“Did he say how?”
“He might have got around to it, if Koniev hadn’t shot him.”
“We need it, Tommy.”
“It’s safe. Stop having people hit me, and I’ll tell you where it is.”
He looked at me for a while. Then he shook his head. “But I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Let’s try something a bit different, shall we?”
They had an old dining table in one of the upstairs rooms, a solid oak thing that looked as if it weighed as much as a bus. Leather straps had been screwed into the wood. They carried me upstairs, laid me on the table, strapped my wrists and ankles securely, and put a wet flannel over my face.
They left me like that for a minute or two, and it was actually quite pleasant. It was nice to lie down, and the flannel was cool against my bruised cheeks and forehead. I started to fall asleep.
Then they started to pour water over the flannel.
“I
’M NOT A
sadist, Tommy,” Charles told me. “I don’t enjoy doing this.”
I just sat and stared at him, my arms wrapped around me. I couldn’t stop shaking.
“So,” he said, “we have Professor Mundt’s little gift to the world, which is good. And we have confirmation of your story, which is also good.”
“How in the name of
fuck
is torturing me
confirmation
?” I hissed. Right then, I would have killed Charles with my bare hands, if I wasn’t afraid of passing out in the attempt.
“I regret that,” he said.
“You utter
cunt
.”
He sighed. “Eleanor was something of a blunt instrument, but she always said that if you gave her a wet flannel and a bucket of water she could make anyone tell the truth.”
Eleanor might have done, but Eleanor was gone. I would have gladly told them that black was white, up was down and hot was cold if it stopped them pouring water onto my face, but I had stuck to my story about my escape from Dresden and then I had given up the hard drive’s hiding place. After that, I had no idea what I had said. The fact that I still wasn’t dead suggested I hadn’t compromised myself too seriously.
“The Coureur,” he said.
“I don’t know. He got me to The Hook and put me on a ferry and I
walked
here from Dover!” I was screaming as hard as I could by the time I reached the end of the sentence, which would have been impressive if something louder than a defeated squeak had emerged from my mouth. I hunched myself up in my chair. “I walked here from Dover, you absolute fucking cunt,” I said quietly. “I didn’t have any money so I had to walk.” I started to cry. “It took days...”
Charles took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and handed it over. “You’ve had a rough time, old chap,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re
sorry
?”
“The Dresden thing should have gone smoothly.”
“Eleanor killed two people before we’d even left Paris,” I reminded him. “Because one of them
annoyed
her. It would have been a
miracle
if the thing had gone smoothly.”
“Well, in retrospect perhaps Lionel or I should have gone along too,” he mused. “But she assured us everything would go like clockwork. She didn’t even think she’d be able to get into Dresden.” There was a tone in his voice which suggested he wanted to revisit the subject of Herr Müller but had decided to leave it for another day. Leo had promised me he would try to have Müller resettled somewhere, and I hoped that had gone well, for Müller’s sake. I didn’t want him to join the absurdly-long list of people who had been hurt or killed during my brief visit to Europe.
“Wiser heads have decided we should pull out,” Charles said. “Myself, I’d quite like to come back one day, but we have to go where we’re told, eh? Which in your case means coming with us.”
“Just let me go home,” I said.
He looked soberly at me. “My superiors will deal with that. I’m afraid it’s rather outside my brief.”
“All I ever wanted was to go home.”
“I know, old chap,” he said. “But you’ve had a rather interesting life, and my superiors would like a chat first. Maybe then they’ll let you go home.”
“And maybe they’ll kill me.”
Charles shrugged. “Perhaps so. But life is all about uncertainty, isn’t it?” He smiled. “You could be hit by a bus tomorrow.”
“You’re just a fucking ray of sunshine,” I told him
L
EO WOULD HAVE
called it a ‘dustoff,’ but it really more closely resembled a day trip with a group of friends. Charles, Lionel, Simon, the Farmboy, a woman called Susan whom I had not met previously, and myself all climbed into a large minicab with a small caravanserai of luggage, and were taken down to London Bridge station. The Shard, which sat on top of the station, always reminded me of the Architects’ Tower in Science City. This one, though, had remained almost empty since the day it was completed, and eventually the company which owned it had gone bust and the building had been taken over by the local council and turned into what the English called ‘social housing.’ It was a vertical town, with shops and markets and schools and its own Artists’ Quarter. I’d seen it from Highgate, and had thought I’d like to visit one day, but now I was up close to it I changed my mind.
We caught a train to Dover. Simon, who collected Europe trivia as if it was a precious natural resource, said the trains had once run from somewhere called Charing Cross, but the station had been wrecked in a bombing thirty years ago and it had been too expensive and dangerous to try to repair or rebuild. It was early in the morning and the train was almost empty as we pulled out of London Bridge and began to rattle and rock slowly over the myriad points and junctions leading out of South London. The Farmboy was wearing the earbuds of a music player and was nodding along to something. Charles was reading a paper copy of
The Times
, Susan a tablet. Lionel and Simon just looked out of the window as city gave way to countryside and the train picked up speed. Nobody seemed to want to talk. I just sat where I was, with my new teeth and my strapped-up ribs, full of painkillers and not noticeably unhappy. It was nice to spend a day without someone hitting me. I looked out of the window and saw a large aeroplane in the sky. I understood aeroplanes and helicopters now, but there were not enough wild horses on the face of the Earth to get me aboard one.
A couple of hours later, we got off the train in Dover and I smelled the sea again. I had grown up literally a universe away from the nearest sea, and of all the new sensory experiences I’d found in England and Europe that smell was the one that I found most affecting. I had read books that mentioned oceans, but they had been fakes, part of an awful confidence-trick to persuade my people that we lived in a real world, not some bizarre artefact. The real sea was wonderful; the five hours I had spent on the ferry to Harwich had been an extraordinary adventure, even if the bulk of the other passengers had seemed to spend their time either getting drunk or being sick or fighting among themselves, or all three at once.
We queued up to board the ferry. Charles went ahead of us, which I thought was rather bright of him. The Security Service would be on the look-out for me; Baines had said they had computers that could recognise people’s faces in crowd photographs. The security cameras here would see me standing with Lionel and Simon and Susan and the Farmboy, and the Service would focus on our little group and ignore Charles. I found it interesting that he would do that, but the others seemed not to notice.
The journey across to France was disappointingly brief. We sat in one of the ferry’s cafés the whole way. The Farmboy demolished two burgers. It occurred to me that I had never heard him speak. We chatted among ourselves until we docked at Calais, then we disembarked in the midst of a big crowd of passengers – Charles again subtly separate from us. I had been worried that the French police would have a similar computer system looking for my face, after my previous visit to France, but the officer at the Immigration desk just glanced at my false passport and waved me through and we walked over to the station and caught a train for Paris.
From Paris, we took a series of trains, each one shorter and more rickety than the last, and at the end of that part of the journey the five of us were standing on the platform of a deserted little railway station deep in the French countryside. Charles no longer seemed to want to disassociate himself from the rest of us.
We waited for over an hour in the late afternoon sunshine with only the sound of birdsong and insects for company. The Farmboy walked to the end of the platform and looked out across the fields and woodlands beyond the station. Lionel and Simon had a little chess set. They put it on one of the benches between them and set the pieces up in what were obviously their positions in an ongoing game. I looked idly at the board but I couldn’t tell who was winning. Charles sat typing on his phone. Susan put on a pair of sunglasses and stretched out on another bench. No one spoke. I thought I detected a tired sort of sadness in the little group. None of them really wanted to leave Europe.
Presently, I heard a noise further up the track, and from around a bend just outside the station came a small train drawn by a steam locomotive. The carriages were decked out in green and gold livery, and it pulled to a stop at the platform with a great hissing and venting of vapour and a guard uniformed in the same livery as the coaches got off, checked the tickets Charles gave him, and helped us load our luggage into the final carriage. Then he led us down the train to a sleeping-car and showed us to our compartments. I shared mine with the Farmboy. Of course.
T
HE LITTLE TRAIN
travelled for hours, unhurriedly puffing along through the countryside, rattling around bends in the track and labouring on gradients. As night fell over the great expanses of farmland and trees, we sat and ate dinner in the dining car. The food was not, as far as my memory served, remotely French, although the wine was.
Afterward, we all retired to our respective sleeping compartments, where the Farmboy proceeded to keep me awake half the night by snoring. I managed to nod off at some point, but not long after that the train pulled into a station and the guard came down the carriage knocking on the doors to wake us up.
As the Farmboy dressed, I lifted the window-blind to one side and looked out. We were in a big station full of steam trains. It was very early in the morning, so there were not many people about, but I could see a vaulting ironwork roof and more liveried railway staff pushing trolleys.
There was a sign right outside the window. On it was the word WŁADYSŁAW. I stared at it and felt a strange sensation in my throat, as if I was about to cry, or about to burst out laughing. I had finally reached Lady’s Law.
3
W
EDNESDAY WAS HALF-DAY
closing. There was no particular reason for this that I could see, but almost all the official buildings in the city – post offices, banks and so on – closed at lunchtime, and most other businesses seemed to have decided that there was no point in staying open as well. Wednesday was Christine’s day for visiting her aged mother in an old-folks’ home on the other side of the city. Christine and her mother loathed each other, but there were certain filial duties which had to be observed, otherwise the neighbours would talk, so she loaded up a basket with crossword magazines and fruit and walked across the Market Square to the tram stop on Rhododendron Street and took herself out to Mount Royal. Thursday mornings, she was usually in quite a foul mood.
That left me in charge of the shop on my own for about four hours, which Christine seemed to think was long enough to trust me without the business going bust or me setting the building alight. There wasn’t a lot of trade on Wednesdays, anyway, outside the usual pensioners coming in to sit and read. I usually spent the time working on a continuing stock-take.
This particular morning seemed busier than usual. There was a sudden rush around ten – a sudden rush for us was three customers coming in at once – and they all had complicated questions about some book or other which required me to consult the inventory, and while I was busy with them another customer came in, a short, stocky man in his late thirties with a confident stride and an unhurried smile. He waited until I had finished the last of my queries and then came over to the desk.
“I wonder if you could help me,” he said.
I smiled my best booksellers’ smile. “I’m sure I can,” I said. “What were you looking for?”
“It’s pretty rare,” he told me, taking a piece of paper from his pocket. “I think I must have tried all the other bookshops in town.” He read, “
Ernshire: Fact And Fiction
, by James McCoy Hawley. Do you know it?”
It didn’t ring a bell, but that was not what you told customers. “Let’s check, shall we?” I took down the relevant volumes of the inventory and looked it up under ‘Hawley,’ ‘McCoy,’ ‘McCoy-Hawley’ and the title, but we didn’t have it.
“We did have a copy,” I lied, “but we sold it a couple of weeks ago. I can order you one from our supplier, if you’re interested.”
He beamed at me. “Excellent,” he said. “I’ve been looking for this one for years.”
“Short print run,” I extemporised. “Small press, solely academic interest.” Customers loved this sort of thing. It sounded arcane and a bit exciting, a glimpse into a secret world, something they might pay a little extra for. “Shall I order it for you, then?”
“Absolutely. Yes, please.”
I picked up a pen and found a scrap piece of paper on the desk and wrote down the title and author. “Can I just have your name and address, please?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s Delahunty. Rafe Delahunty. I say, are you all right?”
A
FTER HE’D GONE,
I shooed the pensioners out, which was a bit like herding chickens, locked the door, and put the CLOSED sign up. I closed the blinds and went back to the desk and sat staring into space. I looked at the address Rafe had given me. It was in Mount Royal, not far from the home where Christine’s mother was fulminating out her final days. Nice part of town, expensive houses, lots of little parks and formal woodlands and old money. A lot of the Presiding Authority lived out there.