‘You don’t reduce it,’ I said. ‘You play a tune on it like a gipsy minstrel.’
Stok sighed histrionically.
‘Look, my friend. Next year, lots of your military friends will be retiring into big capitalist businesses that make armaments. Most of them have signed the contracts already…’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said.
‘I won’t wait a minute,’ said Stok. ‘We know what’s happening. We spend a lot of trouble and money finding out. The type of job your generals retire into depends upon how many big orders for armaments they place. A state of tension makes it easy to order guns. Gehlen provides the tension—it increases the demand—just like an advertising agency. That’s the kind of people who are twisting you around their fingers.’
‘Vulkan said…’
‘Don’t tell me anything Vulkan said.’ Stok spat the words out like bloody teeth. ‘He’s a filthy little Fascist.’ Stok moved near to me and began to speak quietly as though he was sorry he had got excited.
‘I know Vulkan is a brilliant man and I know he’s clever at political debate but believe me, English, he is at heart a Fascist.’
I began to see what a clever con-man Johnnie Vulkan was. It was no part of my job to tell Stok that Vulkan had a brain like a whale’s throat—huge but straining out only shrimp-size thoughts. I said, ‘Then why do you deal with him?’
‘Because he’s helping me make a fool of the Gehlen organization.’
‘And of me?’
‘Yes and of you, English. Try and find your friend Vulkan this night. Ask your friends at the US State Department. Ask your friends at Gehlen’s office. Ask everyone you know, English, and when you come to a dead end come to the Fried-richstrasse Kontrollpunkt or anywhere on the East Berlin phone system and phone me in my office. I’ll tell you where he is and I’ll be the only one to tell you the truth.’
‘We have a deodorant ad that uses the same pitch,’ I said.
‘Try it then,’ said Stok.
‘I might,’ I said. I walked across the room without looking back and went upstairs to my car. I saw Stok’s big shiny Volga parked a little way farther down the street and beyond it two T-54 tanks and an infantry carrier. On my way to Friedrichstrasse I passed a banner that read ‘Learning from the Soviet Union means learning to triumph.’ I was beginning to see what they meant.
I phoned everyone I knew that night to check on Vulkan. I phoned everyone from the Berlin Documents Centre to Onkel Toms Hütte U-bahn Station. Everywhere the reply was the same. Vulkan wasn’t there, they didn’t know where he was and no one knew when he was expected. Some of the sources really didn’t know, who can say which.
I looked through the glass panel of the telephone booth at the grey hardboard and potted plants of the East German control hut.
‘It’s the African fisherman speaking,’ I said into the phone.
‘Who are you calling?’ said the girl, to whom strange names came as no surprise.
‘It’s either an artificial-limb manufacturer or a crocodile,’ I said. ‘I can’t remember which.’
I heard the girl repeat that, then I heard Stok’s booming laugh as he came to the phone.
‘Hendaye-plage,’ said Stok, ‘near the Spanish border.’
‘Stay tuned to Victor Sylvester,’ I said and rang off. The Grepo who had given me the East German coin for the phone waved me good night as I turned around and travelled the ten yards back into the Western Sector where the signs were more likely to say ‘komm gut heim’.
Chapter 21
The king may well be moved to a well-protected
spot away from danger.
Hendaye-plage, France, Monday, October 14th
The road along the plage was marbled with drifting sand. The sun was bright but lifeless as it lowered itself wearily behind the mauve hills. For miles the lonely beach wandered with just one dog for company until the cold wind became too much even for playful dogs. The casinos and hotels were shuttered and stained with the dribbling rust of early winter rain.
From one glass-encased restaurant on the Boulevard de la Mer came the doleful clack of a typewriter. I passed the padlocked kiosk where the torn sign said ‘laces’ and went through the glass door. A young girl in a pink smock looked up from the accounts.
She brought me coffee and I stared out at the grey confluence of sky and sea, growing pink in the light of the setting sun. For another six months the sea would go on practising for summer, coming in each day to smooth out the sand like some fussy old chambermaid making the bed.
‘Do you have any guests?’ I asked wearily.
‘Yes.’ The girl’s smile was gentle and faintly mocking. ‘A Monsieur King and his wife.’
Chapter 22
Checkmate remains the ultimate aim of every player.
Monday, October 14th
In the long dining-room a dozen tables were carefully arranged, even though only three guests were expected to dine. Across the bar were Cinzano ashtrays and shiny equipment for making ‘le cocktail’: strainers, shakers, fruit-knife and swizzlesticks. Behind the bar were rows of bottles, undisturbed since last summer. The tile floor reflected the cold evening air and from the ceiling I heard the chambermaid thumping pillows as my bed was made up for me.
The girl in the pink smock had put away the typewriter and changed into a black dress. ‘What would you like to drink?’ she asked. I poured two Suzes into my face in rapid succession while we agreed how few people came there in the winter. From the kitchen I heard the crinkle of boiling fat and the swish of things being dropped into it. Yesterday they arrived, who knew how long they were staying; she joined me in a third Suze, the fourth one I took up to my room. When I came down for dinner the other guests had arrived back.
Vulkan had a cashmere overcoat over his lightweight Savile Row suit—his tie was Dior and his shirt creamy silk.
‘Hello, Mr King,’ I said. ‘Introduce your friend.’
‘This is Samantha,’ said Johnnie Vulkan.
Samantha said, ‘Hello’.
Chapter 23
King’s Gambit is an opening in which his own
side’s pawns are sacrificed.
Monday, October 14th
Dinner was eaten quietly: codfish in the Basque style. Then Johnnie said, ‘Do you have to follow me?’
I said, ‘I came on business—there’s been some difficulty.’
‘Difficulty?’ said Vulkan. His jaws ceased to chew the codfish.
‘Have you swallowed a bone?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Vulkan. ‘What difficulty?’
‘Nothing much,’ I said. ‘But Gehlen keeps asking for the documents…’
‘Why haven’t you let them have them?’
‘London’s spelled the name wrongly,’ I said. ‘They spelled it BROOM when it should be…’
‘I know what it should be,’ Vulkan said very loudly, then quietly added, ‘the stupid, stupid, stupid bastards.’
‘It matters then,’ I said.
‘It certainly does.’
‘I had it correct when I sent it,’ I said.
‘I know, I know,’ said Vulkan in a preoccupied way. ‘I might have guessed it would all go wrong.’
The waitress came from the kitchen; she saw Vulkan’s plate with only half the fish eaten.
‘Didn’t you like it?’ she said. ‘Shall I bring you something else?’
‘No,’ said Vulkan.
‘There is entrecôte or ris de veau.’
‘Ris de veau,’ said Samantha.
‘Ris de veau,’ I said.
‘Ris de veau,’ said Vulkan, but his mind was far away.
We sat in the bar for the coffee and brandy. Samantha had an English newspaper and she gave me a sheet of it. Finally Vulkan leaned across from his chair.
‘Can you wire London and ask them to do another set?’
‘Certainly Johnnie, anything you say. You know that.’
Vulkan slapped me on the knee.
‘That??
?s what we’ll do then.’ He smiled a big smile. ‘Trust London to mess it all up after we do all this work.’
I shrugged. ‘When you’ve worked directly for London as long as I have, you see their good points and their bad ones. You end up just being glad you aren’t on piecework; and start striking heavily into the expenses.’ I downed the last of my brandy.
‘You are right,’ said Vulkan. He shouted for the waitress and ordered three treble brandies, just to show how well he understood the point I had made.
‘What about the cash for Stok?’ Vulkan said. ‘He’ll want cash you know.’
‘No kidding,’ I said. ‘I was going to try using my Diners’ Club card on him.’
Vulkan laughed lightly and rubbed his hands.
‘You see,’ said Vulkan. ‘This trip to Hendaye is to do with the Semitsa deal.’
‘I don’t want to…’
Vulkan waved his hand. ‘I don’t have to keep it secret. It’s just that in the past I have found it best to compartmentalize my contracts. It’s something I learned in the War.’
‘The War,’ I said. ‘What did you do in the war, Johnnie?’ I asked.
‘What everyone did, I suppose,’ said Johnnie. ‘I did as I was told.’
I said, ‘Some people were told to do some pretty fantastic things.’
‘I did plenty of things I’m not proud of,’ said Johnnie. ‘I was a guard in a concentration camp at one time.’
‘Really,’ said Samantha. ‘You never told me that.’
‘There’s no point in denying it,’ Johnnie said. ‘A man has to live with the things he does. I suppose everyone has skeletons in the cupboard. I never did anything terrible. I never tortured anyone or killed anyone and I never saw any atrocities take place, but I was part of the system. Unless there had been men like me going on duty in the control towers and sitting up there in the freezing cold wind drinking bad coffee and stamping about trying to keep warm—unless there had been little men like me, there couldn’t have been all the rest of it. I’m ashamed of the part I played but so, if he is honest, is the factory worker and the policeman and the railway guard, they were all bits of the system too. We should all have overthrown the system, shouldn’t we?’
Johnnie looked at me provocatively. I said nothing but Samantha said, ‘Yes, you should. You shouldn’t have had to wait until those generals messed around. The whole nation should have recoiled with shock at the things that were done to Jewish shopkeepers in the ‘thirties.’
‘Yeah,’ said Johnnie in a low growl. ‘That’s what I keep on hearing, how we should have overthrown Hitler. That’s because all the stupid people who say so don’t know what they are talking about. What do you mean “overthrow”—you mean that one morning I come on guard duty and shoot the sergeant?’
Samantha was getting the brunt of Johnnie’s wrath. ‘Perhaps it would have been a start,’ she said quietly.
‘Yeah,’ said Johnnie. ‘Great start. The sergeant had a wife and six kids. He was an old-time Social Democrat. He hated all Nazis and was crippled with frostbite that he had caught in Smolensk in 1942.’
‘Someone else then,’ said Samantha.
‘Sure,’ said Johnnie sarcastically. ‘At random, eh?’ and he laughed a laugh that told you that even if he went on talking all night you would never understand what it was like to be inside a concentration camp, especially as a guard.
‘I was glad I was in the camp,’ said Johnnie viciously. ‘Glad, do you hear? Because if I hadn’t been with the concentration camp unit I would have been in the fighting line on the Eastern Front. It was a good job in the camp. A plum job. Everyone wanted that job. Do you think that the whole of Germany was queuing up to fight Bolshevism? That’s what you Americans would like to believe, eh? Well they weren’t—except for the crackpots in the SS. Everyone with an ounce of intelligence was trying to get a job a long way from the fighting line even if he couldn’t eat his lunch for the stink of the cremation ovens.’
Samantha pressed the palms of her hands over her ears and Johnnie laughed another of his laughs. It was more eloquent than anything he could say.
Chapter 24
A skewer is an attack along a straight line.
As the first piece avoids capture it exposes
the second, real target to the full force of
the attack.
Monday, October 14th—Tuesday, October 15th
We all went to bed at half past eleven: or I suppose it would be more correct to say that none of us went to bed at half past eleven, although we all said good night and went through the motions. I put on my sheepskin-lined raincoat and stood out on the plage with the wind screaming around me like demented seagulls.
‘It just has to be,’ I was thinking at 1.15 A.M. The yeasty smell of the ocean had moved closer on the evening tide.
At 2 A.M. I was thinking the same thing but it was 2.30 A.M. before anything happened. Along the front came two bright headlamps. The fact that they were not yellow helped me guess that they were from across the border. It was a white Citroën DS 19. The tyres shot the final inch with a crunch as it halted on the sandy road. The chauffeur jumped out smartly and opened the rear door as Vulkan came down the steps. The light above the rear seat showed the other passenger to be a white-haired man of about fifty, but without binoculars it wasn’t possible to discern more. Vulkan got in hurriedly and I saw him look back up at my bedroom window. The chauffeur closed the door quietly, got in, and they drove away.
I went back to the hotel wondering who in Spain was chic enough to afford a Citroën with San Sebastian number plates and a chauffeur who would wear sunglasses at 2.30 A.M.
I closed the hotel door silently. I stepped into a small room at the foot of the stairs that held the toilet, a bucket, two mops, four packs of Omo, three raincoats, two umbrellas and a pay phone. I had two phone calls to make; the first call was to suggest the Gare St Jean as a meeting place; the second call was to spread the description of the San Sebastian number plates among people who would really care. There is no point in just wondering about the things that puzzle us.
I finished the phone calls without switching on the electric light.
From overhead I heard stiletto heels move quickly across the room. I left the phone off the hook to avoid making any sound and moved across the porch silently in my rubber shoes.
I walked out along the moonlit sea front. The phosphorescent breakers crumbled into shimmering lace-work and the moon was an overturned can of white paint that had spilled its contents across the sea. As I looked back towards the hotel, the front door shot a long trapezium of yellow light across the sandy path. A girl’s figure made a brief shadow-graph in the light, then hurried along the sea front.
Samantha was fully dressed. Ear-rings to eye-shadow proclaimed that she had not been to bed.
‘Johnnie’s gone,’ she said.
‘Gone where?’ I asked.
She buttoned her neck deeper into the big coat. ‘Just gone,’ she said. ‘He said he was going downstairs. Then I heard a car drive away.’
We both stood looking at each other for a long time.
‘I’m cold,’ she said, ‘and I’m frightened.’
I began to walk back towards the hotel.
‘Johnnie’s car is still there,’ said Samantha. She hurried to catch me up and walked alongside me. ‘What he said last night—was that all true?’
‘All true,’ I said.
‘But what, wise guy? I can hear the sneer.’
‘No sneer,’ I said. ‘People seldom report facts wrong. What they distort is their relationship to the facts. It’s possible to describe the Charge of the Light Brigade whether you were on the leading charger or at the other end of the valley brewing up tea.’
‘You’re so sharp,’ said Sam.
‘Now who’s sneering?’
‘Look. Vulkan’s a bright boy, whether you like him or not. He’s written an analysis of Bartok’s string quartets which will shatter the music world when it’s
published.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘If you want to buy a subscription to Vulkan’s fantasy-of-the-month club, go ahead, but I’ve been inoculated against moonshine.’ I was walking quickly and Samantha had to make a hop, skip and jump every few steps to keep alongside. She grabbed my arm.
‘Is that the same moon that we were voted lunar candidates of?’ she asked softly. ‘Didn’t we get elected after all?’
‘We did,’ I said, ‘but I’m demanding a recount.’ I pulled my arm free and opened the glass door. The dining-tables with their shiny plates and conical napkins were bright yellow in the dim light. Sam overtook me on the stairs and, fumbling in her handbag, produced the key by the time we reached her room. She swung the door open. On the bed was a grey leather travelling case and there was another at the side of the wardrobe. One was empty. I reached for the other. There was a small packet of Kleenex and a shoe-horn inside. There were clothes inside the wardrobe and I quickly examined them, prodding and twisting the shoulder padding and listening for the crackle of paper in the seams.
On the dressing-table there were bottles of Cologne, nail varnish, mascara, face-powder, shampoo, suede-cleaning brushes, packets of cotton wool, sun-glasses and cigarettes. I held the open case under them and swept them into it with my elbow. From the dressing-table drawers I shovelled up handfuls of Samantha’s underwear, transparent packets of nylons, flat-heeled shoes with gold straps and a cardboard box containing two diamond rings, a silver bangle, a jewelled wristwatch and some assorted cheap beads. I stretched out my hand towards her without looking up.
‘Handbag,’ I said. ‘Purse.’
She still had it in her hand and now she opened it and studied the contents carefully. She removed two cigarettes, lit them and passed one lighted Camel and the shiny patent leather handbag to me.