Soldier No More (2 page)

Roche was horrified. This was worse than God’s solution to his problems—far worse.

“But Bill … I’ve got a chit for a month’s leave in my pocket—sick leave.”

“Then tear it up. This is your great opportunity—you miss this one, and you’ll be sucking on the hind tit for the rest of your life with the awkward squad, like me. Besides which, it’s an order, so you don’t have any choice.” Bill’s voice hardened, then softened again. “And it’s what you really need for what ails you, young David. A cure is much better than a tonic for a sick man—“

He had to phone Jean-Paul next, but he needed the rest of his drink more than ever.

Room 821 sounded more like a kill than a cure for his sickness. In fact, the only person who’d be really pleased was Jean-Paul himself, who was always reproaching him with the slowness of his professional advancement and the low grade of his material.

He stared into the colourless liquid. There was no escaping from the truth that he’d always been a great disappointment to the Comrades, as well as to himself. If Bill was right—and Bill was usually right—it was the cruellest of ironies that he was now about to go
up
at last when he was at last resolved to get
out
at the first safe opportunity.

But they’d got him now, both of them: if he fluffed the interview, he’d be on borrowed time with Jean-Paul; but if he didn’t fluff it he’d be exactly where the Comrades had always wanted him to be, and then they’d never let go.

There was only one option left, but it terrified him utterly.

He’d already thought about it, he’d even had nightmares about it, waking and sleeping.

PUO was a laugh: he hadn’t got PUO and there was no cure for what he’d got.

The only treatment for gangrene was amputation.

Young Master David

“MR COX?”
inquired a voice, disembodied and slightly metallic, but also recognizably female.

Roche looked round the lift for some evidence of a microphone, and found nothing. There weren’t even any controls: Cox had simply ushered him into the blank box, and the doors had closed behind them, and the lift had shuddered and moved upwards. Or downwards, as the case might be, for all the directional feeling he had experienced—downwards would have been more appropriate. Not down to a particular floor, but down to a
level
, and some level in the Ninth Circle of Nether Hell, which Dante had reserved for the traitors.

“And Captain Roche,” replied Cox, to no one in particular, unperturbed by the absence of anything into which the reply could be addressed. “Captain Roche’s appointment is timed for eleven-hundred hours, madam.”

The Ninth Circle was reserved respectively for traitors to their lords, their guests, their country and their kindred, but Roche couldn’t remember in which order the levels were disposed, down to the great bottomless frozen lake far beneath the fires of Hell. But it did occur to him that—strictly speaking—he was now for the first time in a sort of limbo between all the circles and levels, since he was at last absolutely open-minded on the subject of betrayal: he was prepared to betray either side, as the occasion and the advantage offered.

The lift shuddered again, and the doors slid open abruptly. Roche was confronted by a sharp-faced woman of indeterminate age in prison-grey and pearls, against a backdrop of London roofscape.

“Captain Roche—I-am-so-sorry-you’ve-been-delayed-like-this,” the woman greeted him insincerely. “Have you the documentation, Mr Cox?”

Cox, apparently struck dumb with awe at this apparition, offered her the blue card with Roche’s photograph on it which he had collected, with Roche, from the porter in the entrance kiosk.

The woman compared Roche with his photograph, and clearly found the comparison unsatisfactory.

“This is supposed to be you, is it?” she admonished Roche, as though it was his fault that the photographer had failed.

Roche was at a loss to think of any other way that he could prove he was himself when she abruptly reversed the card for him to see. It certainly didn’t look like him, this fresh-faced subaltern—not like the wary (if not shifty) Roche who faced him in the shaving-mirror each morning.

He took another look at the picture. This was undoubtedly the Tokyo picture of 2/Lt (T/Capt) Roche. And, true enough, this Roche had been just twenty-one years of age, while looking all of eighteen, and the shaving-mirror Roche of this morning, six years of treason on, didn’t look a day under forty.

He grinned at her uncertainly. “I was a lot younger then—Korean War, and all that… ‘A Roche by any other face’, you might say, Miss—Mrs—?” He floundered deliberately, trying to take the war into her territory.

“Mrs Harlin, Captain Roche.” She expelled the invader with a frown. “A Roche by any other face?”

He struggled to keep the grin in its trenches. “A joke, Mrs … Harlin.
Romeo and Juliet
.”

Macb
eth
would have been more appropriate, with
false face must hide what the false heart doth know
. But false face wasn’t doing very well at the moment.

“Indeed?” Mrs Harlin had met jokers before, and their bones were whitening on the wire of her forward defences. “This photograph needs updating, Captain Roche.”

Cox, shamed at last by the massacre of the innocent, coughed politely by way of a diversion. “Do you wish me to remain, madam? Or will you ring for me?” he asked her humbly, without looking at Roche.

“Just do what the book says, Mr Cox.”

“Thank you, madam,” said Cox, taking two paces back smartly and thankfully into the lift, still without looking at Roche.

“Captain Roche, Sir Eustace,” said Mrs Harlin.

Sir Eustace—Mr Avery that was, of the RIP sub-committee—
Sir
Eustace was standing behind a huge desk, half-framed by the great gilded frame of the portrait-of-a-naval-officer behind him.

Roche thought:
That must be the Sargent picture of
‘
Blinker
’
Hall and if Avery
’
s got that picture for his room
then Bill Ballance and Jean-Paul are both right about the new group
.

“David—“

Roche tore himself away from Admiral Hall’s basilisk eye. It was Thain, the only man in Personnel Recruitment who had thought well of him after he’d fluffed half the tests in training.

“David—let me introduce you—Sir Eustace, this is David Roche, about whom you’ve been hearing so much these last few days.”

Christ! Thain had come up in the world since PRT days, to be in this company, overlooked by Admiral Hall himself. But that at least accounted for his own presence, even if ‘hearing so much’ could hardly ring true. Since his PRT debacle he’d been little more than a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, in spite of Thain’s approval. So there really wasn’t so much to hear about.

“Sir Eustace,” he mumbled. But he had to do better than that—here— now—by God! He had to
shine
—

“Colonel Clinton, David—“

Clinton was another new face, but the name rang faint warning bells: one glance at Colonel Clinton was two glances too many—the thought of Colonel Clinton hearing so much these last few days was blood-curdling.

Clinton smiled a terrible non-smile, far worse than Jean-Paul’s bullet-in-the-back-of-the-neck grin. “Roche.”

“Sir!” Roche did his best to make the word stand to attention for him.

“And St. John Latimer, of course,” concluded Thain.

St. John—
Sin-jun
—Latimer was very young, and podgy with it; and languid, like an Oxford undergraduate who had strayed into the wrong party but was too idle to do anything about it.

“Latimer,” said Roche.

“St.John Latimer,” corrected St.John Latimer, swaying at Roche’s
faux pas
.

Latimer—plain
Latimer
, damn it—was standing to the right and slightly behind Colonel Clinton, in the creature-to-the-Duke position, so that was what he might very well be since he was too young to be here by right of experience and seniority. But he might also be some sort of catalyst, introduced to sting a reaction from the provincial and dull Captain Roche.

“Is that so?” Well, if they wanted a reaction, at least let it be a controlled one. “Jolly good!”

Like all good catalysts, Latimer showed no sign of change at this controlled Roche-reaction, he didn’t seem even to have heard it.

“Yes …” It was Thain who produced the reaction, and it was a decidedly uneasy one. “Yes—well, I must be off now—“ he gave Roche a glance which was more charged with doubt than encouragement, like a gladiatorial trainer delivering a novice into the arena “—subject to confirmation and—ah—mutual agreement, David, you will be transferred from the Paris station to Sir Eustace’s care … on a temporary basis, of course—“

Sale or return
—as the liquor store off-licence would have put it. Or
suck-it-and-see
, as Roche’s old squadron sergeant-major more accurately would have pronounced.

“—Colonel Clinton will fill you in on the details.”

The figure of speech was unfortunate after the memory of SSM Lark had been conjured up in Roche’s memory: to be filled in at Shaiba Barracks involved the scattering of blood and teeth in all directions.

“Sir Eustace—Colonel—“ Thain looked at Latimer, who was examining the pattern on the carpet, and decided against including him in the general farewell. Perhaps he hadn’t come up in the world, or not as far as the present company and venue had suggested; perhaps he had only been present to complete the formality of pushing the doomed Roche out on to the arena’s sunlit ellipse of sand for the killing.

“Thank you, Malcolm. You’ve been a great help,” said Sir Eustace with the easy insincerity of long experience. “I’m sorry you have to go …”

He wasn’t sorry. And, what was worse, Thain wasn’t sorry either.

“David—nice to see you again,” Thain nodded.

He wasn’t sorry because he expected Roche to fluff it again. And maybe that had also been what Jean-Paul expected, except the possible benefit of his
not
fluffing it outweighed the attendant risk. What was more, his— Roche’s—very presence here, win or lose, increased his value as a bargaining counter on the board. After this, for Jean-Paul, he would be worth trading in for some other advantage as he had never been before. He was on the way to becoming a blue chip.

And that made his own betrayal of Jean-Paul even better sense, as a pre-emptive strike, to mix the very latest Israeli jargon with that of the Stock Exchange. More than ever, he had to do well now simply to keep ahead of them—both of
them
—until he could bargain on his own account.

The door closed behind Thain.

“Now then, David—sit down—“ Sir Eustace indicated the central chair in front of his enormous desk.

Roche sat down.

There was a file on Sir Eustace’s blotter, which he pushed forward into the sphere of influence within Roche’s reach.

Roche made no attempt to pick up the file, let alone touch it, never mind open it. Instinct was in charge now, preventing him from breaking the taboos.

“We’ve got another David for you, in there,” said Sir Eustace.

“Audley,” said Colonel Clinton. “David Audley.”

“David Longsdon Audley,” said St.John Latimer.

“We want him,” said Clinton.

Roche stared at him. “He’s one of theirs?”

“He’s one of nobody’s,” said Clinton. “But we want him to work for us. And you are going to get him for us, Roche.”

“IT’LL TAKE ABOUT
an hour, maybe,” said the mechanic.

Roche frowned. “An hour?”

“I’m on the pumps as well, see …” The mechanic sized him up. “And then I got to find the right parts.”

“What parts?” Roche hadn’t intended to argue the toss, but with what he’d most carefully done to the engine not an hour before, half an hour’s work was a generous estimate, and no replacements were necessary. “What parts?”

“Ah … well …” The mechanic blinked uneasily. “There’s this bracket, for a start—“ he reached into the engine and wrenched fiercely at something out of sight “—you didn’t ought to go round with it like that, it’ll let you down when you’re miles from anywhere.” He shook his head. “An’ it’s a fiddling old job, too … maybe three-quarters of an hour, say?”

Roche realised that he had miscalculated. He had concentrated on the necessary time element, but had not allowed for time being someone else’s profit.

“You’ve got the parts?” he capitulated.

“Oh yes, sir.” The mechanic relaxed. “It’s only I dunno where to put my hand on ‘em right off. But I’ve got ‘em, don’t you worry.”

“Hmm …” Roche looked at his watch. “It’s simply that I’ve this important business engagement and I don’t want to be too late. So if you can hurry it up as best you can …” He left the possibility of extra reward implicit in the plea.

“Half-hour, sir,” said the mechanic cheerfully, recognising a sucker. “There ain’t much traffic today, so it should be quiet on the pumps, with a bit of luck.”

“Can I use your phone?”

“ ‘Elp yourself, sir. In the office—“

Roche dialled the number he’d been given, and a woman answered.

“Roche for Major Stocker …” Stocker was new to him too. They were all new to him, apart from Thain, who was unlikely to appear again. It was like making a fresh start, in a new job, as a new person … with a new personality which he could adjust according to need as he went along.

“Roche here, sir. The car they gave me has broken down—I’m phoning from a garage just outside Leatherhead—yes, sir, Leatherhead—“ he didn’t say which side, but even if the Major offered to come and collect him the distance was nicely calculated.

The Major didn’t offer.

“The man says three-quarters of an hour, but I don’t think it’ll be as much, sir … Yes, sir, I’ll ginger him up—I’ll be with you as soon as I can, sir.”

He didn’t like the sound of the Major. But then he had never liked the sound of majors, who always seemed to exist in a limbo, either embittered with the failure of their hopes or hungry for the promotion almost within their grasp.