Authors: Philip McCutchan
“Any other contacts, sir—in La Linea, say, or Algeciras?”
“No, sorry. We’ve no one we can trust in La Linea, that I do know—but you can always try the British Consul in Algeciras. The consuls generally keep an ear to the ground —as you know. He may be able to put you in touch with somebody—or he may not. But the Malaga man’s good.”
Shaw nodded. These things were often a matter of luck.
Latymer continued, “Well, that’s the lot, Shaw, so far as I’m concerned. Carberry’ll be sending for you to-morrow for special briefing details and supply of any particular items you think you may need in the way of papers, clothing, and so on. When he’s done with you you’ll be passed on to armament supply.”
A few minutes later Latymer accompanied Shaw down to the entrance hall. Pinkly beaming, he took Shaw’s arm and spoke loudly and within easy hearing of the messengers:
“You mustn’t worry unduly, my dear fellow . . . people are always leaving things in taxis, and all that was in it—or did I tell you—was a report of some tiresome committee on the supply of toothpaste through the Naffy canteens . . . so wearisome,” he fussed, “and such a waste of time really, but there you are, that’s just one of the things sent to try us, don’t you know . . .
good
-bye, my dear fellow. Better remember not to be careless again—it could be important another time.”
Shaw had an amused glint in his eye, but he said smoothly, “I assure you it won’t happen again, Mr Latymer, and I’m sorry you’ve been troubled.”
Mr Latymer trotted away, pompously demanding the attentions of a messenger for some triviality, and Shaw walked out of the building, passed under Admiralty Arch into Whitehall, felt the seeping drip of rain, and decided to go back to the flat by Underground. Taxis were an easily acquired habit, and too many of them rolling up at the unpretentious flat in West Kensington might be remarked upon; and it was a principle of the outfit that its operatives, who were in fact paid lavishly enough, shouldn’t make a splash —not that Shaw would want to do that—but should live as befitted ordinary officers of their rank doomed to an Admiralty appointment; so Shaw, who believed that easily acquired habits were lost only with difficulty, made a habit of economy in things like that.
As he was herded down the steps below Trafalgar Square he found himself hoping that Debonnair wouldn’t get delayed in Paris. He had to see her before he left, and her movements were always a little uncertain when she went away on these business trips. His job was always liable to be dangerous . . . his nerves were playing him up again now, and he felt desperately that he couldn’t go away again without getting things sorted out with Debonnair—just in case he didn’t come back.
In the Tube, swaying westward after he had changed on to the Piccadilly Line, it came to him how you couldn’t trust anybody in this game. Look at them, he thought, sitting there under the adverts for wool, toothpaste, building societies, and London Transport, or standing up against the half-bulkheads . . . bored, indifferent, glazed eyes staring into nothing, blank and wooden and pale. Damp macs and umbrellas. England on a wet day. A couple of teddy boys, a housewife up for the shopping, a man with a bowler hat and a briefcase, a soldier, two Indian students, a couple of nuns . . . the man opposite him, a plum-coloured man who looked like a banker but almost certainly wasn’t if he had to travel by Tube, despite the parking problem, was gazing straight at him without seeing him. Any one of those people in that Tube might be there for a purpose. You couldn’t trust anyone . . . all this and much else passed through Shaw’s mind, and he watched every one in the compartment while he was thinking, but because he was a good operative his eyes remained as blank and his expression as wooden as anyone else’s as the train rocked and racketed him towards Baron’s Court.
The hand-case down by the girl’s long, nyloned legs in the Paris air terminal had a number of old, half-torn off hotel labels on it—the Galle Face, the Barbizon Plaza, the Hotel Australia—but the most recent was a plain one which read:
Miss Debonnair Delacroix, c/o Eastern
Petroleum Company, Rue des Feuilles, Paris.
Nevertheless, the lady was London-bound, had merely forgotten to change the label. The little fat, dapper man with the bow-tie, edging closer through the crowd and trying to catch the girl’s eye, had taken a brief squint at that label because it was always handy to know a girl’s name—but after that brief squint his whole attention was on the girl herself. Debonnair Delacroix was half French, and unmistakably so even to the little fat man who kept a pub in Balham. And even in a crowd which had a fair sprinkling of whole-blooded French girls in it, Miss Delacroix stood out a mile. Figure, hair, clothes all helped to do it, though personality could have managed pretty well on its own. She was a tawny girl, fresh and golden-skinned, with a light, attractive dusting of freckles—lion-coloured, almost, and with the same grace in her movements—and there was just that delightful touch of imperious carelessness, a carelessness which wasn’t in the least studied as it might have been in a wholly English girl, and a faint air of unleonine helplessness, rather appealing helplessness which was actually entirely misleading. Shaw’s own opinion was that for sheer efficiency she had him beat to a frazzle, and Shaw knew what he was talking about, because he’d worked with her in the past.
The Eastern Petroleum Company, not knowing Shaw, couldn’t have expressed an opinion on their relative efficiency, but they did know that when she had left the Foreign Office she had been given a first-class write-up; and they had given her a pretty high position in their Travel and Service Department, the organization which dealt with the arrangements for transport of the Company’s employees by sea, land, and air throughout the world and the accommodation, entertainment, and customary flapdoodle for General Managers and other V.I.P.’s visiting the London Office from overseas—and that was quite a big job for a girl of not quite twenty-eight to handle.
A high-heeled shoe tapped rather impatiently as Debonnair’s bright-eyed glance swept over the heads of the crowd. The glance came to rest on the little fat man. The little fat man tweaked at his bow-tie, gave a slight wriggle of an overdressed bottom, and ogled her from under a bald head which reflected back the lighting system of the air terminal; the glance, unsoftened by these tactics, refused to melt into a smile, rested on him coldly, though amusement lurked in the corners of the mouth and in the eyes.
“Toffee-nosed,” muttered the little man in disgust.
“Not in the least,” said Miss Delacroix frigidly, “but I think that’s your wife approaching, isn’t it?”
The little man shrank. Looking round, he saw the large bosom bearing down on him from the Ladies’, a long string of cheap imitation pearls cast round it like a griping-band on the swelling broadside of a lifeboat; the straw brim of the meal-coloured hat, the one with the violet clusters which he’d bought her at the Co-op before they came away on holiday, topped her like a crust on a cottage loaf. The dapper little man had never hated that hat as much as he did at this moment; he looked sad, jowls drooping into a blue-shadowed line like a long-suffering bloodhound baulked once again of its quarry.
“You win, dear,” he muttered to Miss Delacroix. “Bin different if the old woman ’adn’t a bin here, p’raps?”
Miss Delacroix smiled then. She was attractive already, but those dimples, the fat man thought, cor! They didn’t ought to ’ave bin allowed. “Perhaps,” she agreed kindly.
The bosom hove in between them with a glare from a turkey-red face above, and then the loudspeakers hummed and woke into voluble urgency.
Hie crowd got on the move.
She hadn’t been back in the tiny flatlet in Albany Street for long when Shaw telephoned.
She said delightedly, “How lovely of you to ring, darling. I’m just in, only this minute. How’re things with you?”
“So-so.” Shaw was non-committal. “I thought we might have dinner somewhere. Like to?”
“Would I?” She thought: I know that tone—he’s off somewhere again. Just for a brief moment she regretted the events which had led to her having to quit the Foreign Office— events which, through no fault of her own, had blown the gaff about her, and rendered her useless in the job she’d been doing. She hadn’t wanted to take a humdrum desk job in the familiar environment of the F.O. where she’d always be in contact with the forbidden past. There had been something about those undercover days that had been so much more
exciting
than Eastern Petroleum . . . in particular, her career and Shaw’s had touched—that was how they’d met in the first place and it was something she would never, never forget. She came back to the present, said, “I’d love it, Esmonde darling.” She spoke decisively. “I was just wondering what I could possibly face in this kitchen after Paris. This brute of a stove.”
She jerked out a long leg and kicked the oven door shut. The telephone was in the cubby-hole which passed for a hall, and when it had rung she’d yanked it into the kitchen without getting up from the leatherette-covered revolving high stool; and she was glaring with distaste at half a dozen eggs, a tin of sardines, a stale loaf of hard-looking bread (steam-baked a l’anglaise, and scarcely worthy of the name of bread at all), a hunk of mousetrap cheese aged to a nasty-looking yellow transparency, half a bottle of milk that had gone sour in her absence. A lovely London supper—and it had cost a small fortune. Somehow you didn’t mind so much spending a fortune in Paris. She said into the phone, “Coming round for me?”
“Of course. I’d thought of Martinez.”
He hadn’t really; but he was going to Spain, and the name had just at that moment suggested itself—and, of course, the food was excellent. Might be a good thing, too, just to look through a Spanish menu again. He said, “I’ll be round in half an hour, Debbie. Just as quick as I can make it.”
“Give me time to doll-up and put a face on.”
Actually she didn’t use make-up to any extent—for one thing, she just didn’t need it. She gave a little gurgle of happiness and blew a kiss down the unresponsive receiver. As she clicked the call off her eyes were very slightly misty.
Shaw didn’t talk much in the taxi. A drip of rain ran down his collar from where he’d squelched through London’s filthy weather from Great Portland Street station to Albany Street. And that damned pain in his guts nagged at him, as it would nag all the way to the Spanish-Gibraltar frontier at La Linea. He felt abominably ill in body, depressed in spirit; but he did his best to shake himself out of it by just sitting there and consciously relaxing, liking the nearness of the girl in the intimacy of the dark taxi, enjoying her perfume and the nice feeling that to-night was all theirs, the bitter-sweetness of having to get the most out of the short, calendar-threatened time before good-bye.
During dinner, across the wine-glasses and the gleaming white napery of their table, beneath the softly shaded lights of the room walled with tiles from the ancient Andalusian orange-town of Seville, he gave her the cover-story. Quietly he said, “I’m off the day after to-morrow, Debbie.”
The tawny body gave a small shiver, and she felt a little knot of sadness gathering in her throat; she crumbled a piece of bread, looked at his sensitive face outlined sharply against the red glow from the electric ‘brazier’ by the wall behind their table. She thought—suddenly compassionate and understanding: He’s worried, very worried, and a lot of that is my fault, because I’ve only to say the word and he’d be happy, or at least as happy as he’s ever likely to be until the outfit finally take their hands off him. But that’s the way I’m made and I can’t help it. Or I could help it if I really wanted to, and there’s the rub; the whole point being that I don’t really want to, or rather not altogether and definitely not yet, and really that makes it all the worse. Get me a psychiatrist, she thought, and he’ll tell me I’m nothing but a crazy, mixed-up kid!
All she said was, “I thought you were on the move, darling,” lowering her gaze now to fiddle with the gold watch-bracelet that Shaw had given her some while before. She knew her security record was absolutely O.K., Grade A, first-class, and all the rest of it, but she made a point of refraining from asking questions. In general it was safe enough for Shaw to talk to her, and he knew it, and did sometimes ask her for ideas, but he always had to do the volunteering; and in a restaurant you obviously had to stick to the cover-story anyway.
He said, “I’m leaving the Service, Debbie.”
He saw the query in her eyes—she couldn’t help that; it wasn’t in the least what she had been expecting, and he answered the unspoken plea. He shook his head slightly, his eyes wary. He said, “The Navy—the whole show. I’m going on the retired list.”
She didn’t know whether or not to believe him. Joy and relief showed for an instant, before the automatic thought came to her: There’s more behind this! They wouldn’t be retiring him, even with the Golden Bowler, chucking a useful man on the shelf, not unless it was at his own request, and somehow she didn’t think it would be. But she made herself smile at him, and she said:
“Oh, goody! Now you’ll have to let me get you that high-level job with E.P.C., Esmonde.”
He shook his head. “I’ve got a job already.”
“Quick work!” She lifted an eyebrow. That little gesture, so wonderfully attractive, was like a knife in the heart to Shaw, sent the most extraordinary feelings through his whole body. He grinned at her, mouth tight and drawn as though it resented being forced into a grin.
“I suppose it is,” he said. “But it’s a case of a job for the boys, I’m afraid. I’m an Admiralty civilian—Inspector of Establishments in Armament Supply.”
“Which is?” she queried.
Briefly he told her. He added that his first routine inspection was to be of the Gibraltar depot. Shaw was a good agent, and he convinced people. Debonnair was almost convinced after a while; it sounded genuine enough, but there was one test which couldn’t fail, and it was a test no one but she herself could make. Because of it she said no more, but just waited for him to say something. While she waited she studied him obliquely, saw the hurt that he couldn’t keep out of his eyes as he talked on, almost aimlessly, covering up what he was leaving unsaid. That hurt was there because he wasn’t sure that she would understand . . . understand the way his mind worked. But she did; she thought, if he tells me it’s all right for us to get married now I’ll know he really is retiring. If he doesn’t—then all this is hooey, and he’s off, as I suspected, on another job. Because he’s too goddam decent to make this an excuse for getting me to change my mind and say yes; it would be under false pretences, and he’d never do that to me even for the outfit, even for England. Shaw, she knew, was the kind of man who put homely things first, and believed that national decency, which he wouldn’t confuse with some narrow concept of morality— he wasn’t the kind of man, for instance, to take up silly postures about people sleeping together if they felt so inclined —was firmly based on the decent feelings of the ordinary people who made up the nation. A queer sort of agent—yes, maybe; but she hadn’t noticed that he was the less thought of because of it.