Authors: Gordon Ferris
“Hello, Danny.” Pauli Gambatti stepped over the threshold followed by three of his men. They were all carrying guns.
“Hello, Pauli. Fancy meeting you here. We were just tidying up.”
“I can see.”
He walked over and stood alongside me, gazing at Wilson’s shaking body.
“Got what you wanted, Danny?”
“As much as I think I’ll get.”
“Then we’ll take over. You can leave him with us.” Stan handed over his blowlamp to one of the musclemen. The man grinned in anticipation.
“That wasn’t the deal, Pauli.”
“I gave you the premises. I didn’t say nothing about your guest. I owe this one.”
“What for?”
“We used to have some deals going. Him and me. Must have paid him a couple of grand in backhanders. For turning a blind eye. Ain’t that right, Bertie boy?”
Wilson’s wide eyes said it all. Gambatti continued. “Set you up too, Danny.”
“What?”
“He heard you was looking for me. And after our little rendezvous here, he called me. I told him we’d had words. He asked me to arrange the meeting at the Angel for you. Depending
what you knew, they were going to kill you.”
I thought of the man’s knife dropping from his dead hand. “You bastard!” I said to Pauli, but it covered both of them.
Pauli shrugged. “Business. Shit-head here was holding my cousin and good friend Alberto. He said he’d fix things with the judge.”
“Let me guess…”
“Oh, he fixed it all right. Alberto is rotting in Dartmoor now. Twenty years, wasn’t it, Bertie boy?”
“I tried, Pauli! I tried. For god’s sake man, I can’t buy all the judges,” pleaded Wilson.
“We had a deal. You broke it. It’s payback time. You can go, Danny. And let me know your answer ’bout the other thing, won’t you?”
I looked at Wilson. I looked at Pauli. I knew my answer. I’d sooner rot in Dartmoor with his cousin than join forces with this hoodlum. Instead, I smiled.
“I’ll be in touch, Pauli. Go easy on him.”
Wilson thrashed in his ropes. “Don’t leave me, McRae! Don’t go. They’ll kill me! I’ll help you find her. They’ll listen to me. Don’t
go…!”
I led my lads from the warehouse, and never looked back. Even when I heard the screams. There was nothing I could do for Wilson. Not against three guns. Even if I wanted to.
TWENTY SEVEN
Two months passed. Eve had vanished without even a mention on the inside pages. No one noticed, no one cared. Though I took comfort from the fact that they hadn’t
reported finding a body. I clung – stupidly – to the idea that the Yanks would let her go eventually. In the meantime, the only evidence of her existence was her notebook. I’d
worked through every coded phrase and deciphered every word to see if I could pin down this butterfly that had flitted through my life. Given the notebook’s importance to her I wondered why
she’d left it behind. I would have loved to bounce the matter around with Prof Haggarty, but he’d signed me off a month ago. Still, it was worth a phone call to the lovely, tight-hipped
Vivienne.
“Hi, Viv, it’s Danny McRae. Are you doing anything on Saturday? Fancy the Palais? I bet you’re a great dancer.”
“Certainly not!”
“In that case, I’d like a word with your lord and master.”
I could almost see her cheeks sucking in as she fought for her dignity. “That’s quite impossible. The Professor is in consultation all morning. Besides, you are no longer one of his
patients.”
“Viv, it’s not impossible. Not for a girl like you. Leave a message for the Prof and ask him to call me, there’s a good girl. And if you change your mind about
Saturday…?”
“Hmphh.” She cut me off.
Haggarty called me within the hour. “You’ve been upsetting my lovely receptionist again, Danny. She’s going to be a bag of thorns all day.”
“Sorry about that, Professor. It’s hard to resist. She needs to loosen up a bit.”
“I do the analysis around here, thank you. I thought I’d cast you adrift? You’re not having a relapse? Need a dream deciphered? Your bumps read?”
“Do you ever get off duty? Can I buy you a beer? I mean drop the patient-doctor thing? Now I’m not on your list?”
“Why not? A quick one, mind. After work tonight. There’s a pub round the corner here. Marylebone High Street. The Cambrai.”
His first Guinness hardly touched the side. He was a big man and I could see that he planned to get bigger. We batted the breeze for a while and then I got down to it, at his
urging.
“This girl I was seeing.”
“The reporter lassie?” He started on his second pint.
“That’s the one. Turns out she was a spy.”
“All women are.”
I laughed. “A real spy. A German spy, as it turns out.”
“Sounds like a good story. A four pint story. I’ll line them up.”
Over the barrier of brimming black glasses I told him about her. Told him of Berlin and how I tracked her down with her notebook.
“That was the strange thing, Prof…”
“You don’t drink with me and call me Professor. It’s Mairtin.”
“Mairtin, then. It was precious to her. She never went anywhere without it. Why did she leave it for me to find?”
“Maybe you’ve just answered that.”
“She could have done it to make it look good. The kidnapping.”
Haggarty was shaking his grizzled head. “No need, if I understand your story. No, I think she left it for you to find. She wanted you to come after her. Whether she knew it or
not.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re just puppets, Danny, and it’s our subconscious that pulls the strings. Partly we’re in thrall to the habits we picked up as kids. But mainly we just follow the
groove of our nature. Free will is a grand notion.” He went quiet. “But I think it’s a bit of a con, so it is.”
I must have looked sceptical.
“Take a look at yourself. How did you react when you found she’d gone to Berlin?”
“I went after her. I loved her, Mairtin.”
“One man in ten, or a hundred, might have done what you did. Most would have stayed at home and pined. Not you. She probably knew that’s how you’d react. She was counting on
it.”
“Why?”
“She didn’t want to go, I guess. Her heart wasn’t in it. Or maybe she was just plain scared and needed to know you were going to ride in on your white horse, Sir Galahad.
It’s like suicides. Some, anyway. They make sure they take an overdose just before their loved one comes home. Or they jump off a bridge into the river and find their arms making swimming
motions involuntarily.”
I took these thoughts home with me and nursed them to me as evidence that this affair hadn’t been so one-sided after all. Whether she realised it or not. Of course in
some ways it made things worse. I missed her funny face. I could only picture her in the early days, when she was full of challenge and fun. And love.
While Eve’s vanishing act had failed to cause a public ripple, Wilson’s disappearance had generated plenty of column inches, often on the front page. It began slowly but then grew to
a crescendo of speculation about a brave policeman missing in gangland. There was one cautionary call from Cassells just before I was raided and interrogated for eight hours at Charing Cross nick.
But they had nothing to pin on me, not a shred other than a chance meeting the day before he disappeared. Why had I met him? What did we talk about? Did I still have a grudge over the Caldwell
business? What was the link between me and the spy Ava Kaplan? And so on. But once I started to ask them about her, the whole apparatus closed down. I was ejected into the street and left alone
after that.
Then things went quiet. The press were off chasing the latest accusations of corruption at the Board of Trade. Then Cassells called me and asked to meet.
I sat on the bench in St James’s Park watching the ripples on the grey water. Summer had long gone and the trees were melting back into the earth. Their gold and yellow
finery lay mouldering round their bases, and a cold wind probed my overcoat. I checked my watch. It was time to go. I left my park bench and walked round to the ale house. It was the same tawdry
atmosphere. The same lack of customers. Cassells was nursing what looked like a shandy.
“What happened to the pub idea?” I asked.
“What?”
“You were going to buy a pub. Fill it with big-breasted serving wenches. Drink yourself to a happy retirement.”
I swear he blushed. “A chap has dreams.”
“So why are you still here?”
“I get a good pension. Just another ten years. Then I’m out.”
“Despite the Americans?”
He shrugged. He drew patterns on his glass. “I also believe in it. There’s wickedness out there. We may not eradicate it. We may not even make a dent in it. But would you have me
stop trying?”
“There’s too many people with beliefs. That’s where the fighting starts.”
“Like your girlfriend? Finding her cause at last? Fighting for it. Like we were.”
“What
was
that again? I forget sometimes. Freedom, was it? Is this what freedom looks like? Is this what we do with it?”
“What a world-weary chap you are.”
“Don’t bloody patronise me, Gerald,
old boy
!” I felt a flush on my cheeks. I was angry with everything these days. “Sorry. It’s all such a mess.”
“Conscience?” he asked gently.
“For what?”
“Wilson. It was you, wasn’t it?”
I held his gaze. “I didn’t kill him. I don’t know what happened to him.”
He studied me. “Well, that’s all right then. I needed to know.”
I guessed. “They’ve found him?”
He nodded.
“Alive?”
He shook his head. “In the river. Very low tide. Body weighed down by chains. Covered in burns. Looked like a gangland killing. There was talk, a while back, that he was on their
payroll.”
I searched for some compassion in my heart and found none. Had I fallen so far? Seen too much inhumanity? Like a camp guard?
“Was this why you called me, Gerry?”
“Thought you might want to know. Also…”
“Yes?”
“Your girl. For what it’s worth, the Americans deny it.”
I nodded. He got up then. He pushed on his hat and gave it a firm tap. He smiled and walked out the door. He didn’t shake my hand.
TWENTY EIGHT
Winter laid siege to the capital and turned us all into hoarders. We hoarded coal and tins of Spam. We hoarded blankets and we hoarded our emotions. We each became an island of
shivering humanity, too cold to talk, to meet, to reach out to each other. I filled another foot of shelf with bright orange Penguins, wondering, with each acquisition, if she would have liked it.
I could afford more, now I’d given up the fags.
Surprisingly, business ticked over. I had a nice line in advising companies on security in their warehouses. Tommy Chandler had spread the word. It was enough to keep me in scotch and food.
I’d cut down on beer too. I’d stopped going in to the George every night. It had got harder to keep up the banter with the lads after leaving Wilson to the hyenas. Even Stan looked like
his conscience troubled him, or maybe he regretted giving up the blowlamp to someone else.
New Year came and went and there was no softening of winter’s grip. They began to cut rations again. Disillusion set in with Attlee and co. Fine promises but none of them kept. It was as
though we were tipping back into the gloom of the war years. But this time – apart from winter itself – we had no common enemy. Just each other.
I was sitting in my bedroom, a quilt pulled round my shoulders and the heat from two sullen briquettes cooking my shins. One hand peeked out to hold the latest book. The other nursed a scotch.
It was early evening and sleet was falling past my window. The wet flakes sparkled briefly in the light from the street lamp and were gone.
The door was closed to my office but I heard footsteps on the stairs and then the landing. My outer office door was tried and opened. Someone entered. The steps were hesitant and soon came to a
halt. I put down my book and shrugged off my quilt. I got up and opened the dividing door.
She was standing there, hands deep in her pockets, the scarf round her head dripping with melting snow.
“Can I come in?”
I inspected my glass.
“One too many.”
“Not like you, Danny.” Eve smiled and walked towards me.
“I’ve done with ghosts.”
“Oh, I’m real all right.” On cue the cat slid round the door and mewed. It ran forward waving its stumpy tail and wrapped itself round her legs. Eve bent and picked it up. She
walked up close to me and dropped it on my chest. The cat hissed, sank its claws in me and leapt off.
“You’re real all right.” I rubbed at my wounds. “Are you staying? Dump your coat and come in. There’s a bit of a fire in here.”
She hesitated.
“Oh come on, Eve. You’re back from the dead. We can celebrate. A wee bit.”
She pulled off her coat and hung it on the hat-stand by the office door. She took off the scarf and shook it and hung it on top. She walked back to me. She looked good, but different somehow. It
wasn’t till she came into the light that I realised her russet mop had grown back. It was also now a dark brown.
“Suits you. The hair.”
She fluffed it in embarrassment. I poured her a whisky and topped up mine. We sat, me on the edge of my bed, she on my chair.
“Cheers,” I said. We sipped.
“I’m not staying, you know.”
I nodded and waited.
“Danny, I’m sorry. So sorry.”
“For which bit exactly?”
“My vanishing act. Again.”
“Houdini’s got nothing on you. You could have told me.”
“It wasn’t planned. Not by me. Menachem arranged it. He sent two men.”
I remembered a voice from a radio transmitter in a big house in Berlin.
“How is Mr Begin? Bombed any good hotels lately?”
“Danny! That’s not fair!”
“Neither’s this, Eve! I loved you, you stupid woman. I would have died for you. And what did you do?”
Her face twisted and tears started. A woman’s trick.
“Don’t you see? I loved you too, Danny.”
“I note we’re using past tense.”
“It was the wrong time.”