“Another fine mess you’ve gotten me into, Stanley.”
For more than a moment he did not recognise her. The uniform was wrong. An American WAC. A sergeant.
“Is that . . . is that . . . a disguise, Major Tosca?”
“Sure. Like they’d let me swan in here in full Moscow spook outfit. It’s mine. Had it for years. If I can get into it when needs must then I figure the years aren’t being too unkind to my ass. Which kinda brings me to the point. I saved your ass.”
“How? Thank you, but how?”
“’S’OK. I didn’t come here for thanks. I came to give you the explanation you’re asking for. Yuri was up to something big that day. Cat that got the cream. Suppressed glee just oozing out of the little bastard. I set one of my guys to follow him. No interference, no action. Just follow and report. He saw Yuri gun down those kids, take your car. Make off with your stash. Then he came and got me. Another five minutes you’d have bled to death. We staunched the wound, drove you here and dumped you on the doorstep.”
“I say again, thank you.”
“
De nada
. So long as you get it and you do get it don’t you?”
“Yuri left me to die?”
“Yep? And Frank?”
“Frank wasn’t there.”
“My point to a T. When the shit hits, when the bullets start flying is Frank ever there?”
Wilderness said nothing to this. He was in for a lecture and accepted it. God knows if one more person showed up with a moral or a caveat it could be a Toynbee Hall series for the improvement of the workingman.
“Kid, you got mixed up with a couple of bastards. Your one spark of redemption is that Eddie Clark wasn’t there too.”
“Have you seen Eddie?”
“No, but I can if you want.”
“Tell him nothing’s going to get out. We’re clean as Persil. It’ll all be covered up. I’m even getting promoted to sergeant to make it look kosher. He’s nothing to worry about. He should just . . . carry on regardless. Ask him to come and see me.”
“I’ll tell him, but if he asks me my opinion, which is not unknown, I may have to tell him he needs you like he needs an extra belly button. And you . . . you don’t need Yuri . . . you don’t need Frank. You never did need ’em. You probably never will see Yuri again. The big score was brought on by him being posted east. He was cleaning up and clearing out with his pockets lined. Hell, he’s probably a full colonel with a desk in Dzerzhinsky Square by now. But if you see Frank again, consider yourself unlucky.”
After she’d gone, he squirmed a little, a spasm in his left arm—felt it come up against something solid. He reached his hand out of the sheets and picked it up. A book. Her book. He tilted the spine and tried to focus bleary eyes upon it:
Huckleberry Finn
. He knew the tale. Read it when he was twelve. He got the joke.
§157
Nell came.
Two days later.
In all the misleading ambiguity of grey, crepuscular light.
Stiff little legs and her po-face.
A stellar constant in the gloom.
Said nothing.
Just held out her hand.
He knew what she wanted and pointed at the slim tower of utility drawers next to the bed.
“Top one,” he said.
She took back the keys to her apartment and left.
He wasn’t even sure she’d looked at him.
He thought that perhaps it was the strongest sense of certainty he’d ever known. He’d never been quite so certain of anything in his entire life.
It was over.
It was over.
§158
It was almost Christmas.
Eddie was leaning against the staff jeep out at Gatow Field. He had another volume of Penguin
New Writing
, an anthology that he could dip in and out of, half a dozen pages at a time without ever losing track, but his eyes had drifted off the text to an inner focus.
He’d joked with Joe—“You’ll be the death of me.” But he knew it wasn’t a joke. Part of him, a large part of him, was relieved that Joe was banged up in hospital. He could interpret the promotion, as Joe surely could. Part reward, part punishment in that it meant Burne-Jones had him by the balls and his magnanimity was merely a demonstration of this. Whatever it was Burne-Jones had in mind, Eddie hoped it would take Joe far away from Berlin, as far away as possible. He liked Joe. Joe had been fun, but the fun was over. Joe was pure trouble. He had to be free of Joe. He wasn’t sure how they might remain friends. And he didn’t give a toss if he never saw Frank or Yuri again.
He could be happy again, just flogging coffee and nylons from under his greatcoat. The simple life and the safe. And no more London wide boys.
Yet, here he was, his greatcoat lined with ladies’ underwear meeting a London copper off a plane. What was worse—that he was a copper or that he was from London?
Eddie looked up. There was a lost-looking geezer. No bigger than he was himself, too short to be a copper, almost an elf. He was trailing an RAF flying jacket. This had to be the bloke.
Eddie approached him. Gave him the instant once-over as he did so. This was no Joe, this was no East End wide boy. The overcoat was Regent Street or Savile Row, the shoes and the gloves were handmade . . . and he could hear the accent before the bloke even spoke . . . latent, immanent . . . it was going to be King’s English, pure bloody toff.
“Excuse me, sir. I think I might be your driver.”
The little chap turned jet-black eyes on him, stuck out his hand.
“Troy,” he said. “Frederick Troy, Scotland Yard.”
Eddie’s heart sank at the sound of the public-school vowels. The presumptuous, world-is-my-oyster-so-fuck-you RP of the English upper class. This bloke smacked of trouble too. It could no more work out than had life with Joe. But at least it would only be for a couple of days. Then he’d be free of this prick as well.
§159
London
: Summer 1955
The offices of Drax & Kornfeld, Maiden Lane WC2
Arthur Kornfeld was used to letters like this. A thin brown paper envelope with HM Prison stamped in the corner. There would not be much inside, the briefest, the most courteous of notes—a request or a thank you. He slit the top edge with a paper knife and watched the flake of another’s life fall onto his desk.
As a publisher he received up to a hundred letters a day. The other ninety-nine could wait.
HM Open Prison
East Blathering
Essex
June 11, 1955
My dear Arthur,
I hope you will have time to visit in the next month or so. I am in receipt of full remission and expect to be released in about six weeks. I have to make plans, but, alas, I have put off making plans. I would find it all so much easier if I could talk things through with you beforehand.
Your loving friend,
Karel Szabo
convict no. 11197523
Kornfeld flipped open his desk diary. Friday the twenty-fourth was largely blank—if he could just shuffle off a couple of meetings with those tedious creatures . . . authors . . .
He stuck his head through the open doorway of the adjoining office, where his junior partner, and senior music and biography editor, sat working far harder than he ever did himself.
“Aurie?”
Nowak looked up.
“Last chance to see the inside of an English prison next week.”
Aurelius Nowak had long ceased to find this funny. Arthur, a Viennese, had seen the inside of several English prisons as an interned enemy alien during the war. He spoke of it often. It had not been wholly without pleasure. Nowak, a Pole, had been “interned” too, in Auschwitz and in Belsen. He scarcely mentioned either. They had been wholly without pleasure.
Nowak returned his eyes to the manuscript he was marking up, pencil in hand, darting down the margin in a sequence of squiggles that for some reason always proved a source of delight to him.
“You will understand, Arthur, if I say that I shall pass on that wonderful opportunity and hope I do not live to regret it.”
“OK. Would you mind taking a couple of meetings for me next Friday?”
“Of course not . . . am I to understand Dr. Szabo is about to be released?”
“Yes. He’s in a bit of a funk about it all. I really ought to nip down to Essex.”
How English these phrases sounded to Polish ears—“bit of a funk,” “nip down.” The art of understatement.
“Seven years is a long time. You and I did not serve that long between us. And think how difficult the readjustment was.”
It had taken Kornfeld less than five minutes to adjust to freedom. As far as the bar in the nearest railway waiting room, in fact. Nowak, he knew, would never adjust. It showed in the way he reacted to meeting strangers, to sudden intrusions into his office, to any encounter with a man in uniform. From the postman to the beat bobby. If he lived to be a hundred Nowak would never ask a policeman the time, whatever the old song said.
Part of Arthur had wanted the company. Down by train as far as Chelmsford, and then a long cab ride out into the flat Essex countryside past villages with names that ended in Bumpstead and D’Arcy, thereby summing up what Arthur thought of the county, via West Blathering and Much Blathering to Little Blathering and Blathering-next-Dyke to arrive at last at Her Majesty’s Open Prison, East Blathering—home for most of his sentence to Karel Szabo, spy.
A little ringing round among those few friends that had found space in heart or mind to forgive and Arthur soon had the company of fellow physicist Marte Mayerling. Personally, in the time Arthur had worked with Marte before the war, when physics had been their mutual passion, he had found her passionless about anything else and pretty well humourless. That said, the one soft spot in that heart of pure maths seemed to be for Szabo. She had dismissed his treason with, “Frontiers, nations . . . are for smaller minds than ours . . . we are citizens of the world.” A world they had damn near blown up. At the end of the war Arthur had not wanted to work in physics any longer. He was happy as a publisher—who ever heard of a physicist with luncheon expenses—how many mathematical geniuses took breakfast at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand and charged it to the firm?
Marte had flown far nearer the sun than he and had worked at Berkeley on the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. She had stayed with physics, resumed her place at Imperial College, London, and declined ever after to work on weapons of any kind.
A train ride with Marte, and she had travelled down to Essex with him many times, always left Arthur feeling that he had been brought up to date in his former interest. She saved him having to read the
New Scientist
. Anything of import in it was at the tip of her tongue waiting to be imparted. Occasionally he wished she had learnt the knack of talking about the weather, but you can’t have everything, and more often than not he relished her intensity and the glut of knowledge that threatened to overwhelm him, and, had East Blathering been closer to Colchester than Chelmsford, would most certainly have done so. An English summer’s afternoon, a hip flask, a half-bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet ’48, a little French bread and foie gras in his briefcase, the company of one of the smartest women on the planet . . . what was not to like?
“I do wish you’d learn to drive, Arthur.”
“Stop being a sourpuss, Marte. You’re so much more beautiful when you smile.”
Indeed she was. He doubted she was much over forty, and still a bit of a looker. But she was immune to flattery.
“It’s so tiresome. All the changes. Tube, train, cab, and back again.”
She had learnt “tiresome” early on in their time as adopted English. It alternated with “ghastly” as one of her habitual upper-class moan words.
“Look at it from Karel’s point of view. What do you think he prefers, Blathering or Pentonville?”
“At least I can get to Pentonville just by flagging a cab.”
“But such a ghastly place.”
She knew he was taking the mickey, and changed the subject.
“Does he have plans?”
“Dunno. That’s rather why we’re here.”
“Does he have . . . options?”
“You tell me. Would any British university have him back?”
“Of course not.”
“Then he must find something else to do.”
“Surely he must leave England?”
“He may not have to. He’s still a citizen after all. Technically Karel is a traitor not a spy. They never took citizenship away from him.”
“Good God, why on earth not? There are times I think we have landed down among lunatics. After what he did?”
“Perhaps they just forgot.”
“He gave the atom bomb to the USSR. That, surely, is unforgettable?”
“I’m sure it is. But it won’t be a matter of what the English forget but what they’ll forgive.”