The professor said quickly, ‘I absolutely assure you, dear, that I know nobody called Beatrice. Nobody.’
The young woman gave a tigerish laugh.
‘You seem to have come here,’ the professor said, ‘with the sole purpose of making trouble.’ It was his first complaint and it seemed a very mild one under the circumstances. ‘I cannot think what you have to gain by it,’ he said and walked into the house and closed the door.
‘He’s a monster,’ the girl said. ‘A monster. A sexual monster. A satyr.’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘I know that tag – to know all is to forgive all. Not in this case, it isn’t.’ She seemed to have lost her hostility to Wormold. ‘Maria, me, Beatrice – I don’t count his wife, poor woman. I’ve got nothing against his wife. Have you a gun?’
‘Of course not. I only came here to save him,’ Wormold said.
‘Let them shoot,’ the young woman said, ‘in the belly – low down.’ And she too went into the house with an air of purpose.
There was nothing left for Wormold to do but go. The invisible alarm gave another warning as he walked towards the gate, but no one stirred in the little white house. I’ve done my best, Wormold thought. The professor seemed well prepared for any danger and perhaps the arrival of the police might be a relief to him. They would be easier to cope with than the young woman.
4
Walking away through the smell of the night-flowering plants he had only one wish: to tell Beatrice everything. I am no secret agent, I’m a fraud, none of these people are my agents, and I don’t know what’s happening. I’m lost. I’m scared. Surely somehow she would take control of the situation; after all she was a professional. But he knew that he would not appeal to her. It meant giving up security for Milly. He would rather be eliminated like Raul. Did they, in his service, give pensions to offspring? But who was Raul?
Before he had reached the second gate Beatrice called to him, ‘Jim. Look out. Keep away.’ Even at that urgent moment the thought occurred to him, my name is Wormold, Mr Wormold, Señor Vomel, nobody calls me Jim. Then he ran – hop and skip towards the voice and came out to the street, to a radio-car, and to three police-officers, and another revolver pointing at his stomach. Beatrice stood on the sidewalk and the girl was beside her, trying to keep a coat closed which hadn’t been designed that way.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I can’t understand a word they say.’
One of the officers told him to get into their car.
‘What about my own?’
‘It will be brought to the station.’ Before he obeyed they felt him down the breast and side for arms. He said to Beatrice, ‘I don’t know what it’s all about, but it looks like the end of a bright career.’ The officer spoke again. ‘He wants you to get in too.’
‘Tell him,’ Beatrice said, ‘I’m going to stay with Teresa’s sister. I don’t trust them.’
The two cars drove softly away among the little houses of the millionaires, to avoid disturbing anyone, as though they were in a street of hospitals; the rich need sleep. They had not far to go: a courtyard, a gate closing behind them, and then the odour of a police-station like the ammoniac smell of zoos all the world over. Along the whitewashed passage the portraits of wanted men hung, with the spurious look of bearded old masters. In the room at the end Captain Segura sat playing draughts. ‘Huff,’ he said, and took two pieces. Then he looked up at them. ‘Mr Wormold,’ he said with surprise, and rose like a small tight green snake from his seat when he saw Beatrice. He looked beyond her at Teresa; the coat had fallen open again, perhaps with intention. He said, ‘Who in God’s name …?’ and then to the policeman with whom he had been playing, ‘Anda!’
‘What’s the meaning of all this, Captain Segura?’
‘You are asking me that, Mr Wormold?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wish you would tell me the meaning. I had no idea I should see you – Milly’s father. Mr Wormold, we had a call from a Professor Sanchez about a man who had broken into his house with vague threats. He thought it had something to do with his pictures; he has very valuable pictures. I sent a radio-car at once and it is you they pick up, with the señorita here (we have met before) and a naked tart.’ Like the police-sergeant in Santiago he added, ‘That is not very nice, Mr Wormold.’
‘We had been at the Shanghai.’
‘That is not very nice either.’
‘I’m tired of being told by the police that I am not nice.’
‘Why did you visit Professor Sanchez?’
‘That was all a mistake.’
‘Why do you have a naked tart in your car?’
‘We were giving her a lift.’
‘She has no right to be naked on the streets.’ The police-officer leant across the desk and whispered. ‘Ah,’ Captain Segura said. ‘I begin to understand. There was a police-inspection tonight at the Shanghai. I suppose the girl had forgotten her papers and wanted to avoid a night in the cells. She appealed to you …’
‘It wasn’t that way at all.’
‘It had better be that way, Mr Wormold.’ He said to the girl in Spanish, ‘Your papers. You have no papers.’
She said indignantly, ‘Si, yo tengo.’ She bent down and pulled pieces of crumpled paper from the top of her stocking. Captain Segura took them and examined them. He gave a deep sigh. ‘Mr Wormold, Mr Wormold, her papers are in order. Why do you drive about the streets with a naked girl? Why do you break into the house of Professor Sanchez and talk to him about his wife and threaten him? What is his wife to you?’ He said ‘Go’ sharply to the girl. She hesitated and began to take off the coat.
‘Better let her keep it,’ Beatrice said.
Captain Segura sat wearily down in front of the draughts board. ‘Mr Wormold, for your sake I tell you this: do not get mixed up with the wife of Professor Sanchez. She is not a woman you can treat lightly.’
‘I am not mixed up …’
‘Do you play checkers, Mr Wormold?’
‘Yes. Not very well, I’m afraid.’
‘Better than these pigs in the station, I expect. We must play together sometimes, you and I. But in checkers you must move very carefully, just as with the wife of Professor Sanchez.’ He moved a piece at random on the board and said, ‘Tonight you were with Dr Hasselbacher.’
‘Yes.’
‘Was that wise, Mr Wormold?’ He didn’t look up, moving the pieces here and there, playing against himself.
‘Wise?’
‘Dr Hasselbacher has got into strange company.’
‘I know nothing about that.’
‘Why did you send him a postcard from Santiago marked with the position of your room?’
‘What a lot of unimportant things you know, Captain Segura.’
‘I have a reason to be interested in you, Mr Wormold. I don’t want to see you involved. What was it that Dr Hasselbacher wished to tell you tonight? His telephone, you understand, is tapped.’
‘He wanted to play us a record of Tristan.’
‘And perhaps to speak of this?’ Captain Segura reversed a photograph on his desk – a flashlight picture with the characteristic glare of white faces gathered round a heap of smashed metal which had once been a car. ‘And this?’ A young man’s face unflinching in the flashlight: an empty cigarette-carton crumpled like his life: a man’s foot touching his shoulders.
‘Do you know him?’
‘No.’
Captain Segura depressed a lever and a voice spoke in English from a box on his desk. ‘Hullo. Hullo. Hasselbacher speaking.’
‘Is anyone with you, H-Hasselbacher?’
‘Yes. Friends.’
‘What friends?’
‘If you must know, Mr Wormold is here.’
‘Tell him Raul’s dead.’
‘Dead? But they promised …’
‘You can’t always control an accident, H-Hasselbacher.’ The voice had a slight hesitation before the aspirate.
‘They gave me their word …’
‘The car turned over too many times.’
‘They said it would be just a warning.’
‘It is still a warning. Go in and tell h-him that Raul is dead.’
The hiss of the tape went on a moment; a door closed.
‘Do you still say you know nothing of Raul?’ Segura asked.
Wormold looked at Beatrice. She made a slight negative motion of her head. Wormold said, ‘I give you my word of honour, Segura, that I didn’t even know he existed until tonight.’
Segura moved a piece. ‘Your word of honour?’
‘My word of honour.’
‘You are Milly’s father. I have to accept it. But stay away from naked women and the professor’s wife. Good night, Mr Wormold.’
‘Goodnight.’
They had reached the door when Segura spoke again. ‘And our game of checkers, Mr Wormold. We won’t forget that.’
The old Hillman was waiting in the street. Wormold said, ‘I’ll leave you with Milly.’
‘Aren’t you going home?’
‘It’s too late to sleep now.’
‘Where are you going? Can’t I come with you?’
‘I want you to stay with Milly in case of accidents. Did you see that photograph?’
‘Yes.’
They didn’t speak again before Lamparilla. Then Beatrice said, ‘I wish you hadn’t given your word of honour. You needn’t have gone as far as that.’
‘No?’
‘Oh, it was professional of you, I can see that. I’m sorry. It’s stupid of me. But you are more professional than I ever believed you were.’ He opened the street-door for her and watched her move away among the vacuum cleaners like a mourner in a cemetery.
CHAPTER 2
AT THE DOOR of Dr Hasselbacher’s apartment house he rang the bell of a stranger on the second floor whose light was on. There was a buzz and the door unlatched. The lift stood ready and he took it up to Dr Hasselbacher’s flat. Dr Hasselbacher too had apparently not found sleep. A light shone under the crack of the door. Was he alone or was he in conference with the taped voice?
He was beginning to learn the caution and tricks of his unreal trade. There was a tall window on the landing which led to a purposeless balcony too narrow for use. From this balcony he could see a light in the doctor’s flat and it was only a long stride from one balcony to another. He took it without looking at the ground below. The curtains were not quite drawn. He peered between.
Dr Hasselbacher sat facing him wearing an old pickelhaube helmet, a breastplate, boots, white gloves, what could only be the ancient uniform of a Uhlan. His eyes were closed and he seemed to be asleep. He was wearing a sword, and he looked like an extra in a film-studio. Wormold tapped on the window. Dr Hasselbacher opened his eyes and stared straight at him.
‘Hasselbacher.’
The doctor gave a small movement that might have been panic. He tried to whip off his helmet, but the chinstrap prevented him.
‘It’s me, Wormold.’
The doctor came reluctantly forward to the window. His breeches were far too tight. They had been made for a younger man.
‘What are you doing there, Mr Wormold?’
‘What are you doing there, Hasselbacher?’
The doctor opened the window and let Wormold in. He found that he was in the doctor’s bedroom. A big wardrobe stood open and two white suits hung there like the last teeth in an old mouth. Hasselbacher began to take off his gloves. ‘Have you been to a fancy-dress dance, Hasselbacher?’
Dr Hasselbacher said in a shamed voice, ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ He began piece by piece to rid himself of his paraphernalia – first the gloves, then the helmet, the breastplate, in which Wormold and the furnishings of the room were reflected and distorted like figures in a hall of mirrors. ‘Why did you come back? Why didn’t you ring the bell?’
‘I want to know who Raul is.’
‘You know already.’
‘I’ve no idea.’
Dr Hasselbacher sat down and pulled at his boots.
‘Are you an admirer of Charles Lamb, Dr Hasselbacher?’
‘Milly lent it me. Don’t you remember how she talked of it …?’ He sat forlornly in the bulging breeches. Wormold saw that they had been unstitched along a seam to allow room for the contemporary Hasselbacher. Yes, he remembered now the evening at the Tropicana.
‘I suppose,’ Hasselbacher said, ‘this uniform seems to you to need an explanation.’
‘Other things need one more.’
‘I was a Uhlan officer – oh, forty-five years ago.’
‘I remember a photograph of you in the other room. You were not dressed like that. You looked more – practical.’
‘That was after the war started. Look over there by my dressing-table – 1913, the June manoeuvres, the Kaiser was inspecting us.’ The old brown photograph with the photographer’s indented seal in the corner showed the long ranks of the cavalry, swords drawn, and a little Imperial figure with a withered arm on a white horse riding by. ‘It was all so peaceful,’ Dr Hasselbacher said, ‘in those days.’
‘Peaceful?’
‘Until the war came.’
‘But I thought you were a doctor.’
‘I became one later. When the war was over. After I’d killed a man. You kill a man – that is so easy,’ Dr Hasselbacher said, ‘it needs no skill. You can be certain of what you’ve done, you can judge death, but to save a man – that takes more than six years of training, and in the end you can never be quite sure that it was you who saved him. Germs are killed by other germs. People just survive. There is not one patient whom I know for certain that I saved, but the man I killed – I know him. He was Russian and he was very thin. I scraped the bone when I pushed the steel in. It set my teeth on edge. There was nothing but marshes around, and they called it Tannenberg. I hate war, Mr Wormold.’
‘Then why do you dress up like a soldier?’
‘I was not dressed up in this way when I killed a man. This was peaceful. I love this.’ He touched the breastplate beside him on the bed. ‘But there we had the mud of the marches on us.’ He said, ‘Do you never have a desire, Mr Wormold, to go back to peace? Oh no, I forget, you’re young, you’ve never known it. This was the last peace for any of us. The trousers don’t fit any more.’
‘What made you – tonight – want to dress up like this, Hasselbacher?’
‘A man’s death.’
‘Raul?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me about him.’
‘I don’t want to talk.’
‘It would be better to talk.’
‘We were both responsible for his death, you and I,’ Hasselbacher said. ‘I don’t know who trapped you into it or how, but if I had refused to help them they would have had me deported. What could I do out of Cuba now? I told you I had lost papers.’
‘What papers?’
‘Never mind that. Don’t we all have something in the past to worry about? I know why they broke up my flat now. Because I was a friend of yours. Please go away, Mr Wormold. Who knows what they might expect me to do if they knew you were here?’
‘Who are they?’
‘You know that better than I do, Mr Wormold. They don’t introduce themselves.’ Something moved rapidly in the next room.
‘Only a mouse, Mr Wormold. I keep a little cheese for it at night.’
‘So Milly lent you Lamb’s Tales.’
‘I’m glad you have changed your code,’ Dr Hasselbacher said. ‘Perhaps now they will leave me alone. I can’t help them any longer. One begins with acrostics and crosswords and mathematical puzzles and then, before you know, you are employed. … Nowadays we have to be careful even of our hobbies.’
‘But Raul – he didn’t even exist. You advised me to lie and I lied. They were nothing but inventions, Hasselbacher.’
‘And Cifuentes? Are you telling me he
didn’t exist either?’
‘He was different. I invented Raul.’
‘Then you invented him too well, Mr Wormold. There’s a whole file on him now.’
‘He was no more real than a character in a novel.’
‘Are they always invented? I don’t know how a novelist works, Mr Wormold. I have never known one before you.’
‘There was no drunk pilot in the Cubana air line.’
‘Oh, I agree, you must have invented that detail. I don’t know why.’
‘If you were breaking my cables you must have realized there was no truth in them, you know the city. A pilot dismissed for drunkenness, a friend with a plane, they were all invention.’
‘I don’t know your motive, Mr Wormold. Perhaps you wanted to disguise his identity in case we broke your code. Perhaps if your friends had known he had private means and a plane of his own, they wouldn’t have paid him so much. How much of it all got into his pocket, I wonder, and how much into yours?’
‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying.’
‘You read the papers, Mr Wormold. You know he had his flying-licence taken away a month ago when he landed drunk in a child’s playground.’
‘I don’t read the local papers.’
‘Never? Of course he denied working for you. They offered him a lot of money if he would work for them instead. They too want photographs, Mr Wormold, of those platforms you discovered in the Oriente hills.’
‘There are no platforms.’
‘Don’t expect me to believe too much, Mr Wormold. You referred in one cable to plans you had sent to London. They needed photographs too.’
‘You must know who They are.’
‘Cui bono?’
‘And what do they plan for me?’
‘At first they promised me they were planning nothing. You have been useful to them. They knew about you from the very beginning, Mr Wormold, but they didn’t take you seriously. They even thought you might be inventing your reports. But then you changed your codes and your staff increased. The British Secret Service would not be so easily deceived as all that, would it?’ A kind of loyalty to Hawthorne kept Wormold silent. ‘Mr Wormold, Mr Wormold, why did you ever begin?’