“They parachuted me into the occupied area of Poland, at the heart of which sat my Krakόw, the new capital of Germany’s General Government. I went with my own, Polish, passport and a mission to re-establish my old contacts at the University. This I attempted to do.”
“My parents were long dead by this time, and my sister and her husband had been living in the family house in the Las Wolski Forest; a beautiful place, Kathleen – you cannot imagine! Such a beautiful house, too. The French would call that house a ‘chateau’, a word I find infinitely preferable to ‘castle’. However, those days had gone, by then . . . The Nazis had taken the house by force and my sister and her husband were now living in a completely different situation. For Zuza’s husband, an academic at the University, was one of the many, many Jews of Krakow. And I am sure that you know what happened to them.”
“The Nazis had already built the ghetto on the opposite side of the Vistula River from the Kazimierz - the Jewish Quarter - but the deportations had not yet begun. Zuza and Gregor were held captive inside the walls of the ghetto and it had become impossible to reach them. Everything had changed. The University, too, was quite different from what it had once been, for so many academics had been removed from their posts, or fled, or been sent to the ghetto, that the halls were silent. However, I did manage to find one old contact - I shall call him Jarek - an ambitious man who had been high up in the administration of the University and was now hand in glove with the Nazis.”
“Jarek had become a very busy fellow. I had never trusted this man, so I shadowed him and soon discovered what was keeping him so very busy. The University of Krakόw had owned many old treasures and, just before the invasion, there had been clumsy, panicked attempts to conceal them. Jarek had known of this. Of course, the Nazis were no different from any on the long list of history’s barbarians - they looted whatever they could find - and Jarek had his nose to the ground, like a pig sniffing out truffles for his new masters. This I conveyed to my handlers in London through a system of code that I had invented and which - although I hesitate to boast - is, I believe, still widely employed.”
“Now Hutchcraft had no interest in saving Poland’s precious heritage, but he saw that the stolen treasures might be used to our advantage and enable us to infiltrate the General Government. To that end, he decided to use my background, as the scion of an old and venerable Krakόw family. (Incidentally, I believe that the difference in our backgrounds had always rankled with him, but no matter.) I was to approach Jarek with the promise of a magnificent hoard of Medieval glassware from Lesser Poland, that had been buried in various locations in Las Wolski forest, and which had belonged to the Piotrowski family. In return for this, I was to receive a share of Jarek’s increasingly profitable business and an introduction to his Nazi contacts. The Medieval glass was a fiction, you understand. Not that there was no glass; deliveries arrived, by parachute, of glass which had been manufactured by an English glassmaker of such talent that it might be mistaken for the real thing.”
“By this time I had made contact with the local Resistance and there were four of us at work, taking delivery at night under the most dangerous of circumstances and burying the glass in the forest, all set to be found. Not in one, or even two sites, but three, four, five! The sheer detail of the operation astounded me . . but that was Hutchcraft’s forté. He worked in layers, you see, Kathleen. He would pile layer upon layer, as if painting a watercolour. Moles and shadows, allies and enemies, truth and lies. So many details seemed superfluous until one realised the point of the obfuscation; that only one man could see the whole picture. Only one man ever held that power. Hutchcraft.”
He fell silent, gazing into the fireplace at the crumbling ashes that were rapidly greying and losing their heat. I glanced over at the coal scuttle, but there was no more coal.
“And did it work, Mr Piotrowski?” I asked. “The glass?”
“What? Oh . . yes, my dear. For a while, it worked. They fell for the glass and I made new friends, you might say. I was able to pass on this and that to London; information that I had picked up from my contacts in the General Government. For a time it became a black bag operation . . .”
The old spy was slowing down. Was it the memories, or was it the vodka that had begun to affect him?
“Black bag, Mr Piotrowski?”
“Oh, I managed to get a small listening device in. To a room they used for meetings and so forth. I hope it was useful; difficult to say. One never really knew.”
He glanced over at me, his eyes as unreadable as ever.
“Then I had to go and chance my arm,” he sighed. “They began the deportations . . to the camps. Deportations? Does it count as a deportation when there is no distance to go? They built a camp in Krakόw, itself, you know? Inside my beloved city.” A flicker of rage, immediately suppressed. “Well, I tried to trade some stained glass: some precious, stained glass windows from a tiny church that Jarek knew of, deep in the countryside. I tried to trade it for the release of Zuza and Gregor. I thought Our Lady might forgive me that. But I chanced my arm once too often and I was arrested.”
“They didn’t know I was a spy, of course; if they’d known that I would not be here today. They never found the recording equipment, to the best of my knowledge. But they sent me to Liban Workcamp, even so; a hell-hole where Polish and Ukrainian prisoners quarried limestone. I spent the rest of the war there and survived where so very many did not. I got this there . .” he tapped his left leg, “this scar that you observed earlier, Kathleen.”
“What happened to Zuza and Gregor,” I asked, quietly.
“Zuza and Gregor? Well, my dear . . Zuza and Gregor also survived. Tell me you expected that one, eh? While living in the Krakόw ghetto, my sister and her husband had found work in a factory, you see, and it saved their lives. A factory run by a gentleman named Mr Schindler.[45]”
He shook the vodka bottle, but it was empty.
“Ah, but I’m tired! And drunk! You hold your drink well, Kathleen. For an Englishwoman.”
“Thank you. ‘Though I’m not sure that’s something a girl should be proud of!”
If I’d felt a bit tipsy earlier, I certainly felt as sober as a judge now, sitting bolt upright on the settee. Bells had been ringing in my head for the last fifteen minutes of Mr Piotrowski’s story; I’d got to get all the details straight. For his part, he looked as if he’d tied up all the ends and was ready for bed, but I couldn’t let him go yet.
“Haven’t you forgotten something, Mr Piotrowski?” I said. “I mean to say, you haven’t told me the end of the story. The story of you and Hutch. And, when you have . . ” I drained the last drop of vodka and set the glass on the floor, “ . . I’ve got a story of my own that I really think you should hear.”
“You’re a hard woman, Kathleen – forcing a tired, bitter, old fellow to stay up so late and tell stories! But I will do my best for you and it has nothing whatsoever to do with your yellow hair and deep, blue eyes,” he laughed. “It is bitter, however, the end of my story. Bitter enough to curdle the milk, if I had any.”
“So . . the war ended and I returned to London. I was growing old and the limestone quarries of Liban had aged me still further, so I hardly expected to get my old job back. But I did expect to collect my pension; that I did expect after so many years of faithful service. And a welcome, of sorts, perhaps. I felt that might not be too much to ask.”
“I walked back into that building in Waterloo and enquired whether I might see Hutchcraft, who, I was informed, had become the new head of operations at HQ. But, no, no they were afraid that was not possible. Not under any circumstances. Not now, not ever. They turned me away. Again and again I was turned away, until, eventually, they dispensed with any pretence at manners and threw me out of the building. I waited beyond the door until an old colleague appeared, waylaid him and asked if he would be kind enough to look into the matter further. He wasn’t happy about it but I persisted and he did so, for old times sake I presume.
”
“My colleague blushed when we met again - I remember that as if it were yesterday. He had dug up the notes that my case officer had written on the operation in Krakόw and had managed to make a carbon copy of the document for me. He pushed it into my hands and fled, as if all the shadows in HQ were on his tail. I read those notes in utter disbelief. For Hutchcraft had accused me of profiteering for my own advantage in Poland; he had virtually accused me of collaborating with the enemy, although not in so many words. It was enough to lose me my job and pension and the last vestiges of my good name, but not enough to send me to prison.”
He hauled himself up, staggering slightly.
“So there you have it, Kathleen; the sorry tale of an old Polish spy.
“Forgive me, my dear, I must go to bed . .”
“Just a minute, Mr Piotrowski,” I said. “I haven’t told you my story, yet. My story about glass.” He cocked his noble head to one side. “Yes, glass. Ring any bells? Well . . I say it’s my story, but really it’s not. It’s Tristram’s story. Or Rosa’s story, perhaps.”
He looked confused, but flopped back down on the settee to hear me say my piece. And say it, I did. I told him everything I’d learned about the glass and, by the time I’d finished, he didn’t look tired, or drunk, or bitter at all.
Then I retrieved the envelope from my handbag and we opened it together.
23. Up and At It
The barge didn’t get as far as Dover. My niece had informed me that Reg Arkonnen owned a factory there and I’d presumed that to be where we were heading, but we weren’t. A basic contravention of rule number one, on my part, therefore (rule number one being, never, ever, presume). We were somewhere between Deal and the Port of Dover, right in the area where the Stone family lived. It made a fatalistic kind of sense. Try keeping Rosa out of this one, was my first thought.
A speedboat joined us from North Foreland, just past Broadstairs and Ramsgate, zooming around the nose of The Humber to take up the lead. The following surge sloshed over the deck, soaking Joe Bloggs’ feet as it swilled past the mainmast, over the port rail and back down into the Channel. The wave also caught me unawares because I’d been crouched low in the bows, scanning the horizon, and was comprehensively soaked. Behind me, Joe gurgled and thrashed a bit; he’d been fully conscious for hours and was as furious as a shark on the end of a fishing-line. He had a right to be, all things considered.
I soon realised why the speedboat had gone in front when I saw what was rising out of the waves to sun itself. The boat was piloting us around the Goodwin Sands. It was a calm, bright morning, with no breath of a wind, but I shivered. There wasn’t an Englishman alive who could forget the appalling storm of the year before and the wreck of the South Goodwin Lightship.[46] It looked so tame in the sun; just one, northerly, sandbar partially exposed above the water. Such a bright, singing, yellow - more like bucket and spade territory than a maritime graveyard - but hop onto it, take one step in the wrong direction and, storm or no storm, it could suck you down, feet first, without a hope in hell of escape.
The pilot boat turned towards shore, pointing directly through a deep gully that cut between the ridges of sand and the Humber promptly listed to starboard in its wake. It was then I realised that our destination was not, in fact, Dover, but somewhere more private; some secret port of call hidden among the white frontiers of the famous chalk cliffs.
I scrambled along the deck and climbed down the rear cargo hold. I was beginning to tire of our game of snakes and ladders. With our destination almost in sight, I felt that the time had come to declare ourselves.
As luck would have it, I’d no sooner got to the bottom of the ladder than Jay Tamang appeared at the top. I dearly hoped that Severs had his hands full navigating the barge through the Goodwins because, if not, he must have thought he was seeing double.
“Mr Upshott,” he raised the neck of his hood to speak. “She’s awake, Mr Upshott.”
I put my finger to my own mask, to hush him up. My mind raced. Damn the woman; just ten more minutes and we might have made dry land. As it was, there were two of us, when there should have been one, and the game was up the minute that she went to take a look at her captive. Should I create a distraction? Tipping the box of steel rods into the ocean would have been satisfying, but that container was much too heavy for us to shift (and Jay Tamang, quick and resourceful as he’d turned out to be, was no muscle man.) Besides, just suppose that the rods were already enriched with uranium. It would be a disaster to contaminate the English Channel with that type of gunk. I wished I knew more about the subject. If enrichment had taken place, then wouldn’t there be cooling water present, and a great deal more effective protection than one steel box? I cursed myself for not picking Tamang’s brains about the matter while I’d had the chance, because he’d certainly have known; the bloody cat had distracted me from the job in hand. I’d come over all sentimental and allowed Tamang to get a decent night’s kip, when I should have been interrogating him about nuclear fission.
But the time for chat had been and gone. The game was nearly at an end. I unzipped my suit and un-looped the little whip from my belt.
“Here,” I shoved the thing at Tamang, who took a step backwards when he saw what it was. “You’ll have to deal with Mrs Arkonnen, Jay. Just ensure she can’t shout out to alert the welcoming party, will you? You may not need this, but it’s better than nothing.”
I retrieved the gun from behind the chair, and took off Joe’s heavy boots, in case I needed to run. I motioned to Tamang to do the same.
“Quick, now. Let’s commandeer the ship.”
And he certainly was quick, shucking off his boots and flying back up the ladder. He had a score to settle with Dilys Arkonnen, of course . . I couldn’t help wondering how he’d go about it.
——
I don’t think I’ve seen anybody scale a ladder like Mr Tamang did when he clocked Aunt Dilys was waking up. He was up and out of it like greased lightning, while she was still yawning and blinking and patting her hair.
“Heavens, did I fall asleep at the table?” She peered round the cabin, dumbfounded. “I can’t think what came over me. What on earth is the time, Magnus?”
“ I suppose it could be morning, Aunt, but it’s difficult to say, stuck down here.”
“Morning?!” She jumped up and then swiftly regretted it, her backside crashing back down on the chair. “Ayee . . my head’s killing me.”
“I’d make you a brew, if I could.”
“Thank you, Magnus. I appreciate the thought. It’s one of my headaches, I suppose; I’m prone to them . . although I usually get them after a lot of close work at the typewriter.” She had her head in her hands. “I must say, I feel like death warmed up.”
“Me too, man.”
“Man?” Her headache didn’t blunt that sharp tone of hers, I noticed.
“Sorry.” I was keeping on her good side if it killed me. Which it might well do.
“But, then, yesterday was rather tiring.” She straightened her neck, as if she’d suddenly remembered something. “Yes, indeed.” Taking extreme care - like a drunk shouldering his hangover - she got herself up and headed for the lav. “Well, no time for slacking. I’ll just tidy myself up and then I’ve got a bit of business to see to on deck. You can look after yourself, can’t you Magnus.”
It wasn’t a question, it was a statement and I wasn’t about to contradict her. Of course, I’d had some breakfast with the spies so I was alright there (though nobody’d brought up the subject of bedpans, which I was going to have to broach any minute).
Pablo plummeted from the top bunk and came to say hello, wheezing blocked drains at me.
“Hey, boy. How’re you doing, eh?” We rubbed noses.
There was a slight noise from above - the cabin hatch sliding open, softly - and an almost imperceptible tread on the ladder. I couldn’t see who it was from the bunk, but my heart began to thump.
Aunt Dilys shut the lav door behind he
r.
“I swear that cat gets bigger every time I look at him, Magnus. Are you sure he’s not a tig . . .”
A terrifying, hooded, figure leapt from the top of the ladder. She had no time to scream before his gloved hand was over her mouth and a knotted length of rope looped round her neck. She went limp, as he dragged her over to the kitchen, throttling the life out of her with the garrotte.
“No!” I shouted. “Stop! That’s not right!”
He bent her backwards over the sink and all I could see was her thin legs lifting off the ground, one white sandal tipping from a flailing foot.
“No!”
There was a smart rap - like a drop of rain pinging into a bucket - and she slumped onto the floor.
“No!” I shouted. “What the hell have you done to her?”
Mr Tamang took off his hood and bent to look at me, hands on his knees and breathing hard.
“I have knocked her on the head with the frying-pan,” he replied. “Don’t worry, Mr Arkonnen. All will be well.”
——
I crept up behind Severs and stroked the back of his head with the muzzle of the handgun.
“Disobey me and you’re dead,” I whispered.
He burbled something and tried to turn round, so I flipped off his cloth cap and screwed the muzzle into his skull, so that there’d be no mistaking just what I held in my hand.
“Got that?”
“Yes, yes, yes!”
“Good. Now, keep following the speedboat and take us in, nice and easy. Just do your job and I’ll let you live to do it again another day.”
We were well inside the Goodwins by now, a mere mile or so away from the shore and our escort zoomed off into the distance, leaving us to make our own way in. The white cliffs loomed, closer and closer and I was able to make out a stretch of shingle and figures gathering at the water’s edge. I’d hoped for just one or two men that Tamang and I could overpower, but it looked like it wasn’t going to be that simple.
The Yellow Glass Page 24