He sat down before his card-index. He had to make his cards look as plausible as possible before she came. Some of the agents seemed to him now to verge on the improbable. Professor Sanchez and Engineer Cifuentes were deeply committed, he couldn’t get rid of them; they had drawn nearly two hundred pesos in expenses. Lopez was a fixture too. The drunken pilot of the Cubana air line had received a handsome bonus of five hundred pesos for the story of the construction in the mountains, but perhaps he could be jettisoned as insecure. There was the Chief Engineer of the Juan Belmonte whom he had seen drinking in Cienfuegos – he seemed a character probable enough and he was only drawing seventy-five pesos a month. But there were other characters whom he feared might not bear close inspection: Rodriguez, for example, described on his card as a night-club king, and Teresa, a dancer at the Shanghai Theatre whom he had listed as the mistress simultaneously of the Minister of Defence and the Director of Posts and Telegraphs (it was not surprising that London had found no trace of either Rodriguez or Teresa). He was ready to jettison Rodriguez, for anyone who came to know Havana well would certainly question his existence sooner or later. But he could not bear to relinquish Teresa. She was his only woman spy, his Mata Hari. It was unlikely that his new secretary would visit the Shanghai, where three pornographic films were shown nightly between nude dances.
Milly sat down beside him. ‘What are all these cards?’ she asked.
‘Customers.’
‘Who was that girl last night?’
‘She’s going to be my secretary.’
‘How grand you are getting.’
‘Do you like her?’
‘I don’t know. You didn’t give me a chance to talk to her. You were too busy dancing and spooning.’
‘I wasn’t spooning.’
‘Does she want to marry you?’
‘Good heavens, no.’
‘Do you want to marry her?’
‘Milly, do be sensible. I only met her last night.’
‘Marie, a French girl at the convent, says that all true love is a coup de foudre.’
‘Is that the kind of thing you talk about at the convent?’
‘Naturally. It’s the future, isn’t it? We haven’t got a past to talk about, though Sister Agnes has.’
‘Who is Sister Agnes?’
‘I’ve told you about her. She’s the sad and lovely one. Marie says she had an unhappy coup de foudre when she was young.’
‘Did she tell Marie that?’
‘No, of course not. But Marie knows. She’s had two unhappy coups de foudre herself. They came quite suddenly, out of a clear sky.’
‘I’m old enough to be safe.’
‘Oh no. There was an old man – he was nearly fifty – who had a coup de foudre for Marie’s mother. He was married, like you.’
‘Well, my secretary’s married too, so that should be all right.’
‘Is she really married or a lovely widow?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t asked her. Do you think she’s lovely?’
‘Rather lovely. In a way.’
Lopez called up the stairs, ‘There is a lady here. She says you expect her.’
‘Tell her to come up.’
‘I’m going to stay,’ Milly warned him.
‘Beatrice, this is Milly.’
Her eyes, he noticed, were the same colour as the night before and so was her hair; it had not after all been the effect of the champagne and the palm-trees. He thought, She looks real.
‘Good morning. I hope you had a good night,’ Milly said in the voice of the duenna.
‘I had terrible dreams.’ She looked at Wormold and the card-index and Milly. She said, ‘I enjoyed last night.’
‘You were wonderful with the soda-water siphon,’ Milly said generously, ‘Miss …’
‘Mrs Severn. But please call me Beatrice.’
‘Oh, are you married?’ Milly asked with phony curiosity.
‘I was married.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Not that I know of. He sort of faded away.’
‘Oh.’
‘It does happen with his type.’
‘What was his type?’
‘Milly, it’s time you were off. You’ve no business asking Mrs Severn – Beatrice …’
‘At my age,’ Milly said, ‘one has to learn from other people’s experiences.’
‘You are quite right. I suppose you’d call his type intellectual and sensitive. I thought he was very beautiful; he had a face like a young fledgling looking out of a nest in one of those nature films and fluff-like feathers round his Adam’s apple, a rather large Adam’s apple. The trouble was when he got to forty he still looked like a fledgling. Girls loved him. He used to go to UNESCO conferences in Venice and Vienna and places like that. Have you a safe, Mr Wormold?’
‘No.’
‘What happened?’ Milly asked.
‘Oh, I got to see through him. I mean literally, not in a nasty way. He was very thin and concave and he got sort of transparent. When I looked at him I could see all the delegates sitting there between his ribs and the chief speaker rising and saying, “Freedom is of importance to creative writers.” It was very uncanny at breakfast.’
‘And don’t you know if he’s alive?’
‘He was alive last year, because I saw in the papers that he read a paper on “The Intellectual and the Hydrogen Bomb” at Taormina. You ought to have a safe, Mr Wormold.’
‘Why?’
‘You can’t leave things just lying about. Besides, it’s expected of an old-fashioned merchant-king like you.’
‘Who called me an old-fashioned merchant-king?’
‘It’s the impression they have in London. I’ll go out and find you a safe right away.’
‘I’ll be off,’ Milly said. ‘You’ll be sensible, won’t you, Father? You know what I mean.’
2
It proved to be an exhausting day. First Beatrice went out and procured a large combination-safe, which required a lorry and six men to transport it. They broke the banisters and a picture while getting it up the stairs. A crowd collected outside, including several truants from the school next door, two beautiful Negresses and a policeman. When Wormold complained that the affair was making him conspicuous, Beatrice reported that the way to become really conspicuous was to try to escape notice.
‘For example, that siphon,’ she said. ‘Everybody will remember me as the woman who siphoned the policeman. Nobody will ask questions any more about who I am. They have the answer.’
While they were still struggling with the safe a taxi drove up and a young man got out and unloaded the largest suitcase Wormold had ever seen. ‘This is Rudy,’ Beatrice said.
‘Who is Rudy?’
‘Your assistant accountant. I told you last night.’
‘Thank God,’ Wormold said, ‘there seems to be something I’ve forgotten about last night.’
‘Come along in, Rudy, and relax.’
‘It’s no earthly use telling him to come in,’ Wormold said. ‘Come in where? There’s no room for him.’
‘He can sleep in the office,’ Beatrice said.
‘There isn’t enough room for a bed and that safe and my desk.’
‘I’ll get you a smaller desk. How’s the air-sickness, Rudy? This is Mr Wormold, the boss.’
Rudy was very young and very pale and his fingers were stained yellow with nicotine or acid. He said, ‘I vomited twice in the night, Beatrice. They’ve broken a Röntgen tube.’
‘Never mind that now. We’ll just get the preliminaries fixed. Go off and buy a camp-bed.’
‘Righto,’ Rudy said and disappeared. One of the Negresses sidled up to Beatrice and said, ‘I’m British.’
‘So am I,’ Beatrice said, ‘glad to meet you.’
‘You the gel who poured water on Captain Segura?’
‘Well, more or less. Actually I squirted.’
The Negress turned and explained to the crowd in Spanish. Several people clapped. The
policeman moved away, looking embarrassed. The Negress said, ‘You very lovely gel, miss.’
‘You’re pretty lovely yourself,’ Beatrice said. ‘Give me a hand with this case.’ They struggled with Rudy’s suitcase, pushing and pulling.
‘Excuse me,’ a man said, elbowing through the crowd, ‘excuse me, please.’
‘What do you want?’ Beatrice asked. ‘Can’t you see we are busy? Make an appointment.’
‘I only want to buy a vacuum cleaner.’
‘Oh, a vacuum cleaner. I suppose you’d better go inside. Can you climb over the suitcase?’
Wormold called to Lopez, ‘Look after him. For goodness’ sake, try and sell him an Atomic Pile. We haven’t sold one yet.’
‘Are you going to live here?’ the Negress asked.
‘I’m going to work here. Thanks a lot for your help.’
‘We Britishers have to stick together,’ the Negress said.
The men who had been setting up the safe came downstairs spitting on their hands and rubbing them on their jeans to show how hard it had all been. Wormold tipped them. He went upstairs and looked gloomily at his office. The chief trouble was that there was just room for a camp-bed, which robbed him of any excuse. He said, ‘There’s nowhere for Rudy to keep his clothes.’
‘Rudy’s used to roughing it. Anyway there’s your desk. You can empty what’s in the drawers into your safe and Rudy can keep his things in them.’
‘I’ve never used a combination.’
‘It’s perfectly simple. You choose three sets of numbers you can keep in your head. What’s your street-number?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, your telephone-number – no, that’s not secure. It’s the kind of thing a burglar might try. What’s the date of your birth?’
‘1914.’
‘And your birthday?’
‘6 December.’
‘Well then, let’s make it 19-6-14.’
‘I won’t remember that.’
‘Oh yes, you will. You can’t forget your own birthday. Now watch me. You turn the knob anti-clockwise four times, then forward to 19, clockwise three times, then to 6, anti-clockwise twice, forward to 14, whirl it round and it’s locked. Now you unlock it the same way – 19-6-14 and hey presto, it opens.’ In the safe was a dead mouse. Beatrice said, ‘Shop-soiled, I should have got a reduction.’
She began to open Rudy’s case, pulling out bits and pieces of a radio-set, batteries, camera-equipment, mysterious tubes wrapped up in Rudy’s socks. Wormold said, ‘How on earth did you bring all that stuff through the customs?’
‘We didn’t. 59200 stroke 4 stroke 5 brought it for us from Kingston.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘A Creole smuggler. He smuggles in cocaine, opium and marijuana. Of course he has the customs all lined up. This time they assumed it was his usual cargo.’
‘It would need a lot of drugs to fill that case.’
‘Yes. We had to pay rather heavily.’
She stowed everything quickly and neatly away after emptying his drawers into the safe. She said, ‘Rudy’s shirts are going to get a bit crushed, but never mind.’
‘I don’t.’
‘What are these?’ she asked, picking up the cards he had been examining.
‘My agents.’
‘You mean you keep them lying about on your desk?’
‘Oh, I lock them away at night.’
‘You haven’t got much idea of security, have you?’ She looked at a card. ‘Who is Teresa?’
‘She dances naked.’
‘Quite naked?’
‘Yes.’
‘How interesting for you. London wants me to take over contact with your agents. Will you introduce me to Teresa some time when she’s got her clothes on?’
Wormold said, ‘I don’t think she’d work for a woman. You know how it is with these girls.’
‘I don’t. You do. Ah, Engineer Cifuentes. London thinks a lot of him. You can’t say he would mind working for a woman.’
‘He doesn’t speak English.’
‘Perhaps I could learn Spanish. That wouldn’t be a bad cover, taking Spanish lessons. Is he as good-looking as Teresa?’
‘He’s got a very jealous wife.’
‘Oh, I think I could deal with her.’
‘It’s absurd, of course, because of his age.’
‘What’s his age?’
‘Sixty-five. Besides, there’s no other woman who would look at him because of his paunch. I’ll ask him about the Spanish lessons if you like.’
‘No hurry. We’ll leave it for the moment. I could start with this other one. Professor Sanchez. I got used to intellectuals with my husband.’
‘He doesn’t speak English either.’
‘I expect he speaks French. My mother was French. I’m bilingual.’
‘I don’t know whether he does or not. I’ll find out.’
‘You know, you oughtn’t to have all these names written like this en clair on the cards. Suppose Captain Segura investigated you. I’d hate to think of Engineer Cifuentes’s paunch being skinned to make a cigarette-case. Just put enough details under their symbol to remember them by – 59200 stroke 5 stroke 3 – jealous wife and paunch. I will write them for you and burn the old ones. Damn. Where are those celluloid sheets?’
‘Celluloid sheets?’
‘To help burn papers in a hurry. Oh, I expect Rudy put them in his shirts.’
‘What a lot of knick-knacks you carry around.’
‘Now we’ve got to arrange the darkroom.’
‘I haven’t got a darkroom.’
‘Nobody has nowadays. I’ve come prepared. Blackout curtains and a red globe. And a microscope, of course.’
‘What do we want a microscope for?’
‘Microphotography. You see, if there’s anything really urgent that you can’t put in a telegram, London wants us to communicate direct and save all the time it takes via Kingston. We can send a microphotograph in an ordinary letter. You stick it on as a full stop and they float the letter in water until the dot comes unstuck. I suppose you do write letters home sometimes. Business letters …?’
‘I send those to New York.’
‘Friends and relations?’
‘I’ve lost touch in the last ten years. Except with my sister. Of course I send Christmas cards.’
‘We mightn’t be able to wait till Christmas.’
‘Sometimes I send postage stamps to a small nephew.’
‘The very thing. We could put a microphotograph on the back of one of the stamps.’
Rudy came heavily up the stairs carrying his camp-bed, and the picture-frame was broken all over again. Beatrice and Wormold retired into the next room to give him space and sat on Wormold’s bed. There was a lot of banging and clanking and something broke.
‘Rudy isn’t very good with his hands,’ Beatrice said. Her gaze wandered. She said, ‘Not a single photograph. Have you no private life?’
‘I don’t think I have much. Except for Milly. And Dr Hasselbacher.’
‘London doesn’t like Dr Hasselbacher.’
‘London can go to hell,’ Wormold said. He suddenly wanted to describe to her the ruin of Dr Hasselbacher’s flat and the destruction of his futile experiments. He said, ‘It’s people like your folk in London. … I’m sorry. You are one of them.’
‘So are you.’
‘Yes, of course. So am I.’
Rudy called from the other room, ‘I’ve got it fixed.’
‘I wish you weren’t one of them,’ Wormold said.
‘It’s a living,’ she said.
‘It’s not a real living. All this spying. Spying on what? Secret agents discovering what everybody knows already …’
‘Or just making it up,’ she said. He stopped short, and she went on without a change of voice, ‘There are lots of other jobs that aren’t real. Designing a new plastic soapbox, making pokerwork jokes for public-houses, writing advertising slogans, being an M.P., tal
king to UNESCO conferences. But the money’s real. What happens after work is real. I mean, your daughter is real and her seventeenth birthday is real.’
‘What do you do after work?’
‘Nothing much now, but when I was in love … we went to cinemas and drank coffee in Expresso bars and sat on summer evenings in the Park.’
‘What happened?’
‘It takes two to keep something real. He was acting all the time. He thought he was the great lover. Sometimes I almost wished he would turn impotent for a while just so that he’d lose his confidence. You can’t love and be as confident as he was. If you love you are afraid of losing it, aren’t you?’ She said, ‘Oh hell, why am I telling you all this? Let’s go and make microphotographs and code some cables.’ She looked through the door. ‘Rudy’s lying on his bed. I suppose he’s feeling air-sick again. Can you be air-sick all this while? Haven’t you got a room where there isn’t a bed? Beds always make one talk.’ She opened another door. ‘Table laid for lunch. Cold meat and salad. Two places. Who does all this? A little fairy?’
‘A woman comes in for two hours in the morning.’
‘And the room beyond?’
‘That’s Milly’s. It’s got a bed in it too.’
CHAPTER 3
1
THE SITUATION, WHICHEVER way he looked at it, was uncomfortable. Wormold was in the habit now of drawing occasional expenses for Engineer Cifuentes and the professor, and monthly salaries for himself, the Chief Engineer of the Juan Belmonte and Teresa, the nude dancer. The drunken air-pilot was usually paid in whisky. The money Wormold accumulated he put into his deposit-account – one day it would make a dowry for Milly. Naturally to justify these payments he had to compose a regular supply of reports. With the help of a large map, the weekly number of Time, which gave generous space to Cuba in its section on the Western Hemisphere, various economic publications issued by the Government, above all with the help of his imagination, he had been able to arrange at least one report a week, and until the arrival of Beatrice he had kept his Saturday evenings free for homework. The professor was the economic authority, and Engineer Cifuentes dealt with the mysterious constructions in the mountains of Oriente (his reports were sometimes confirmed and sometimes contradicted by the Cubana pilot – a contradiction had a flavour of authenticity). The chief engineer supplied descriptions of labour conditions in Santiago, Matanzas and Cienfuegos and reported on the growth of unrest in the navy. As for the nude dancer, she supplied spicy details of the private lives and sexual eccentricities of the Defence Minister and the Director of Posts and Telegraphs. Her reports closely resembled articles about film stars in Confidential, for Wormold’s imagination in this direction was not very strong.