The balding one took advantage of the time pause. He went on going on. ‘My pappy used to say, “Drink Scotch by itself; with rye mix a little water, bourbon, mix it with something strong, something really strong.”’ He laughed loudly. ‘Something really strong,’ he said again.
‘I like Germany. I like to eat there. I like to drink there. I like German girls.’
‘I was living in Scandinavia.’
‘It’s not the same. It’s different in Scandinavia.’
‘I was at school in a big town in northern Scandinavia,’ said Jean, jumping in agilely as an agent must, and speaking the truth as an agent should.
‘Narvik,’ said the balding one. ‘I know it very well. I knew every bar in Narvik this time last year. Right?’ he asked Jean.
She nodded.
‘How many’s that? Three?’ said the man who knew Bel Ami.
I had completed most of the indents for the typewriter ribbons, recording tape and assorted junk of every day by the time the airmen had ‘holycowed’ and ‘go-go-goed’, ‘see you latered’, ‘izz at the timed’ out of the lounge. She came up behind me and touched the top of my head. I found the unexpected intimacy of her physical contact as shocking as if she’d undressed in public. As she moved into view and sat down opposite me I reappraised her attitude. She was anxious to let me know, to reassure.
The sheer effectiveness of her reassurance precluded my trusting it. Perhaps she was my Dolobowski. She offered me one of those menthol cigarettes that taste like paint remover. I declined.
She said, ‘SAC lead crews flying B52s working out of Bodo, Norway and the new field near Herat.’ She took her time to light it with a small silver cigarette lighter. ‘I’d say committed targets; those launching sites West South West of Lake Balkach and the underwater nuclear submarine harbours in eastern Novaya Zemlya that Bobby did the work on. You probably already saw the modified bombbays on two of the planes.’
I nodded.
‘Two of the crews have ex-Navy bombardiers; probably a delay device operating by water pressure.’ She tilted her chin as high as possible and exhaled a stream of smoke vertically at the ceiling in an unusually theatrical way. From somewhere she had obtained a WAC officer’s summer dress, and like Dalby she had this quality of looking right in whatever she wore. She waited for praise as a small child does; posturing and preparing declaimers of skill or virtue. The days of Pacific sunshine had made her face a deep shade of gold, and her lips were light against the dark skin. She sat there studying the evenness of her finger-nail polish for a long time, and then without looking up said, ‘You went to Guildford?’
I nodded without moving my head.
‘In the first week when it’s all physical exercises and IQ tests and you mostly sit around waiting to be interviewed and talked out of staying on for a second week, there’s one lecture about cell construction and cut outs?’
I knew that she knew that this isn’t the sort of thing anyone ever talks about. I hoped that the lounge wasn’t bugged. I didn’t stop her.
‘Well, Alice is my only official contact, through her you were my permanent contact. As far as I’m concerned…’ she paused. ‘Since then I have used no other as the man in the Pears soap advertisement said.’
I sat saying nothing.
‘The complexities of my job are greater than they were in Macao. Greater than I suspected they could be,’ Jean said very quietly. ‘I didn’t see myself doing that.’ She moved her head towards where she’d been sitting. ‘But I’ll go along with it OK. But there has to be a limit as far as personalities are concerned. I am a woman. I can’t switch allegiances easily, and I am biologically incapable of answering to a group.’
‘You may be making a big mistake,’ I said, more in order to gain time than because it meant anything.
‘I don’t think so, and I’ll show you why,’ she said, ‘if you’ve an hour or so to spare.’
I had. I followed her out and across to the car park. She climbed behind the wheel of a Ford convertible, the metal and leather hot enough to produce a sickly smell. Attached to the sunshield on the driver’s side was a grey painted metal box. One face of it was perforated; it was a little larger than an English packet of twenty. This was a monitoring radio sending conversation to a receiver up to three miles away, and by means of a compass device sending a signal to show the direction and travel of the vehicle. It was a compulsory fitting to all cars on Tokwe. It was attached by means of two magnets, and I pulled it off the metal of the sunshield and buried it deep in a big box of Kleenex in the rear seat of a pink Chevrolet parked alongside. I hoped no one would bother to tune us in. If they did without a visual check we’d be just another silent vehicle in a car park outside the Mess.
The tyres made an ugly noise on the gravel as Jean let in the clutch and swung the power steering into a fierce lock. Neither of us spoke until a mile down the road we stopped to fold back the hood. I took a close look around the windscreen and door tops.
‘I think we are probably clean now but let’s be careful just the same—you were smart to take the convertible,’ I told her.
‘It cost me a four-ounce bottle of Arpège perfume to find out not to pet in any other sort of vehicle.’
‘Put it on expenses,’ I said.
For a mile or so the road was first-rate, and except for a couple of police jeeps, quite clear. Jean moved the accelerator firmly down and I heard the faint snickering noises from the gear-box as the ratios automatically changed until the road wavered under us like a heat haze, and the roar of the wind dragging across the spotlight and aerial produced an unbearable battering on the eardrums. Small flying creatures hit the windscreen and burst in ugly blotches. Jean, her head tilted back, held the wheel in a confident, loose hold, unusual in women drivers. I watched the coast flash by until we began to lose speed. I felt her foot lift from the accelerator. She’d judged the distance nicely and scarcely used the brakes. Instead of following the road where it curved left inland, to the Administration Centre, we turned off the road to the right. The wide over-sprung car lurched into the soft edges of the road and its big blue nose lifted as the tyres engaged the soil of a rough pathway. Now the going was much slower and it took nearly an hour to reach the cluster of undergrowth to which we had seen the track leading from the hard road. Jean pulled us well in under the low vegetation, and cut the motor. We had left the desiccated sectors upon which both the Administration Centre, the Mess and Living Quarters were built. This lee side of the island, shielded from the prevailing wind, was cloaked in luxuriant vegetation and punctuated by razor-sharp layers of volcanic rock. Here and there large cone-shaped mustard-yellow flowers were beginning to close their fleshy petals.
The sun was low towards the west by now, and the spiky leaves of the palms sliced the heavy blue sky. Jean took a rubber-covered torch out of the glove compartment and we continued along the same pathway on foot. Through the undergrowth we passed the cheap-wristwatch sounds of a thousand insects kicking the heavy air.
‘I don’t want to pry or appear paranoiac,’ I said, ‘but what’s the deal?’ She took her time about answering and I supposed that she had as many doubts and puzzlements as any of us at that time.
‘Last night I was up here with Dalby. He took me along so that if anyone found us off the road it would just look like a petting party. I’m returning on my own account. You’re along for the ride. OK?’
I said ‘OK.’ What else could I say? We went on in silence.
Then she said, ‘Last night I was left in the car. Now I want to see the part I missed.’
I helped her over a rusting coil of barbed wire. We went out of sight of the road, and unless anyone looked very closely, the car was well hidden, too. Over to the right, the shore line, away from the new road, had been left littered with World War II debris. Golden-brown rust patterns grew over the broken landing craft. One on the far side gaped with rectangular holes, as though someone had attempted to salvage the metal with a cutter, but had found
the market price out of proportion to the work. The one nearest me, a Tank Landing Craft, was charred at the front. The heat had bent the steel doors like a tin toy under a child’s foot. Below the water-line rich wet greenery busied itself in the lapping, clear movement of the water. The land was at its most uneven here and had clearly provided opportunities for a tenacious defensive. So well had the Japanese engineers merged their defence works into the terrain that I wasn’t aware of the enormous Japanese blockhouse until I saw Jean standing in its doorway. It was nearly twentyfive feet high and built of tree trunks with steel rail supports here and there. The weather had eaten at the poor-quality cement, and the vegetation had run riot. The entrance was low even for a Japanese, and waist-high scarlet flowers followed the great burnt scars along the timbers as though the plant gained a special nutriment from the carbonized wood.
Jean’s rubber-soled shoes left waffles in the sand, and where the ground was damper I noticed Dalby’s. His were deeper, especially at the heel.
‘Was it heavy—’ I said.
‘The box he carried? Yes, it looked heavy. How did you know?’
‘I guessed he didn’t drop by for the view, and something kept him too busy to notice you behind him.’
She stood aside as I climbed up the partly blocked entrance. ‘He told me to wait by the car, but I was curious. I came after him as far as the entanglement.’ Her voice changed and echoed mid sentence as we moved into the fort. It was a well-made one. The island had been one of the wellprepared outer-perimeter island bases bypassed until the latter days of the war. Through the entrance a narrow passage led down a gentle slope into a pitch-dark little room about twelve feet square. The air was cold and moist. We stood there in silence hearing the steady crunch and whoosh of breakers on the shore, and the constant rasping of insects. I’d taken off my dark glasses and slowly my range of vision increased.
The greater part of the room was taken up by olive-coloured metal boxes, upon which the faint English words like ‘Factory’ and some numbers could be read. In the far corner bars of sunlight revealed broken wooden boxes, large metal cartridge clips and some rotting leather straps. On a level with the top of my head a platform extended the width of the blockhouse, and provided slots for the machine-gunners and riflemen. Jean’s torch made yellow ovals as it splashed over the emplacement walls, and held in one spot almost over the entrance door. She’d seen Dalby’s torch shine through that particular port. I moved the green metal boxes to make a step. The paint on the underside where they had been packed together was fresh with stencilled lettering: ‘.5 Machine-Gun. US Army. 80770/GH/CIN/1942’. I moved a second box to put on the first, and fifteen inches of brightly coloured lizard flashed away under my feet. I climbed up on the platform and edged slowly along the crumbling earth ledge. Close to, the sand was almost black, and stank of death and the things that lived on it.
There was not room to stand upright, and I went slowly on my hands and knees. The bright daylight burned my eyes through the narrow slot, and I could see a small traverse of beach. The largest of the grey landing craft was directly in line with me, and from this angle I was able to see a burnt and battered tank jammed into the open doors like a squashed orange in the mouth of a barbecued sucking-pig. A red and yellow butterfly entered the white chalky bars of light from the aperture. Slowly I moved towards the corner position. It was darker and damper there. Jean threw the torch to me without switching it off. Its beam described a curious parabola. I used it to probe the thick roof timbering above me. Part of the ceiling had given way when the flame-thrower had poured its jet of flaming petrol into the firing position. The timber supports were charred, and under my hands, only the metal parts of a heavy bolted-down machine-gun remained. I could see nothing that looked recently disturbed. I moved the light a little to the left. There was a wooden crate with writing on it. It said, ‘Harry Jacobson, 1944, 24 DEC. OAKLAND. CALIF. USA.’ and was empty. Jean said why didn’t I try the box underneath. I’m glad I did. It was a new cardboard box and carried the words ‘General foods. One gross 1 lb packets Frozen Cranberries’. Under that was printed a small certificate of purity, and a long serial number. Inside was a brand new short pattern seven-inch cathode ray tube, about a dozen transistors, a white envelope and a yellow duster containing a long-barrelled machine-pistol shiny with fresh oil. There were no cranberries. I opened the envelope, and inside was a small slip of paper about 2 in by 6 in. On it were written about fifty words. There was a VLF (very low frequency) radio wave-length, and a compass bearing and some mathematical symbols that were a bit too post-graduate for me. I held it up for Jean to read. She looked up and said, ‘Can you read Russian?’
I shook my head.
‘It’s something about…’
I interrupted her. ‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘Even I know the Russian script for “Neutron Bomb”.’
‘What are you going to do with it?’ she asked.
I took the paper, still carefully holding it by the edge and dropped it back into the cranberry box. The envelope I burned, and ground up the ash under my heel. ‘Let’s go,’ I said.
We scrambled down the steep approach to the beach. The sun was a two-dimensional magenta disc, and the sunset lay in horizontal stripes like finger-nails and torn golden lacerations across the ashen face of the evening. I wanted to be away from something—I don’t know from what. So we walked along the water-line, stepping around crates full of death, Coca-Cola and Band-Aids.
‘Why would anyone,’ Jean didn’t like to say Dalby, ‘take a cathode ray tube up there?’
‘He didn’t want anyone to know that he can’t bear to miss “Wagon Train”.’
Jean didn’t even contract her lip muscles.
‘I don’t want to pry,’ I said, ‘but I’d find this whole thing more simple if you’d tell me what he said about me.’
‘That’s easy—he said that one of the departments of the “friends” is sure you are working for the KGB.* They told the CIA direct and everyone is pretty steamed up. Dalby said he wasn’t sure one way or the other but that the CIA are keen to believe it since you killed a couple of their Navy people a long while ago.’
‘Dalby said it’s not him that laid the complaint?’ I asked.
‘No—he said that one department gives you a higher clearance than he has at present—him working away from the office caused that of course—he didn’t seem very happy about that, by the way.’
She paused, and said apologetically, ‘Did you kill those men?’
‘Yes,’ I said a little viciously, ‘I killed them. That brought my total up to three, unless you count the war. If you count the war…’
‘You don’t have to explain,’ Jean said.
‘Look, it was a mistake. There’s nothing anyone could do. Just a mistake. What do they want me to do? Write to Jackie Kennedy and say I didn’t mean it?’
Jean said, ‘He seemed to think they’d wait to see if you made a contact before doing anything. He wondered if Carswell was working with you, and radioed a code message to have Carswell and Murray isolated.’
‘He’s too late,’ I said. ‘They bludgeoned me into giving them a leave of absence just before we left.’
‘That will probably convince Dalby,’ Jean said. She looked great with the sun behind her and I wished I had more of my frontal lobes to spare to think about it.
‘That Carswell’s my contact?’ I mused. ‘Maybe. But I’d say he’s more likely to suspect you.’
‘I’m not your contact.’ She almost seemed not sure.
‘I know that, dope. If I was really working for the KGB I’d be smarter than to be suspected, and I’d know who my contact was before I reached an island like this one, or there’d be no way for me to cross-check on you. But since I’m not working for that six-storey building in Dzerzhinsky Street, there isn’t a contact, so you’re not one.’ Jean splashed a foot deliberately into the water and smiled a childlike smile. The sun was behind her head like the open door of a Scunthorpe steel fur
nace. A light breeze coming off the ocean had her dress clinging like cheap perfume. I dragged my mind back to earth. She said, ‘It seems I didn’t listen as closely as you did at Guildford.’
A tank track lay half out of the water like a giant caterpillar, and the waves spurted and splashed through the intricacies of the interwoven castings. Beyond us, B61, the tank with one track missing, lay head down in the glistening foam. The sea, to which it had returned in a great involuntary semicircle, drummed and slapped at the great metal hull in restless derision. Jean stopped and turned back to me; across her gold face a strand of black hair hung like a crack in a Sung vase. I must concentrate.
‘Suppose you don’t work for the KGB but whoever thinks you do, wants to do something to stop it, what will they do?’
‘It’s something no one in our position ever dares think about,’ I said.
‘But suppose it happens. Then they have to think about it.’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘then they think about it.’
Jean’s voice was husky, a bit edgy and rasplike. I realized she’d spent a lot of night time wondering what to do about me, and at least I owed her enough not to kid her around.
I said, ‘They don’t give them free legal aid at the Old Bailey, and let them sell their memoirs to the Sundays if that’s what you mean.’
‘No, that’s what I thought,’ she said. ‘It’s only multiple murderers who are allowed to do that.’ She paused. ‘So what does happen?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s never happened to me before. I suppose it’s “Slip your feet into this bag of wet cement, the boat’s just leaving.”’
The breakers bombarded the reef in thundering crashes that shook the sand beneath our feet.
‘It’s getting chilly,’ she said. ‘Let’s go back to the car.’
* * *
*The Soviet spy apparatus: ‘Committee on State Security’.