Vagabond (47 page)

She took the napkin from his hand as he wolfed down the last of the hot dog, stretched past him and dropped it into a bin. The first can went after it, and he opened another.

More men and women came by, umbrellas up.

Their heads and shoulders were closer. Twice he saw the girl wipe rainwater from Malachy Riordan’s forehead with her hand. She threw the greater part of her own hot dog into the bin. Their shoulders touched. He thought he knew where Gaby Davies would be. He had given her full rein. He had a coat that kept off most of the rain from his shoulders and upper chest but hadn’t unfastened the hood and had no cover for his legs. Malachy Riordan was on the third can.

He was a voyeur. Danny Curnow had acted that part often enough. He had watched people throughout the years he had spent in Ireland, and had been on courses to refine his skills. He had looked across parks and through windows and had seen men and women prepare themselves to kill and . . .

The woman who looked after the secretarial side of Bentinick’s life at Gough had once been seen in a corner of the mess, nursing a coffee and reading from the poems of William Butler Yeats. She had been asked which one, and why. Something about an Irish airman with the Flying Corps in the First World War:

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love . . .

The quotation had sobered the bar. Did they hate the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army, who bombed and shot their way deeper into a cul-de-sac? Did they love the Protestant civilians, with their bigotry, intolerance and stupidity? Little
hate
and little
love
. She had read on:

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the skies . . .

Danny Curnow might not have been alone. ‘The lonely impulse’ had resonance. He remembered barely a word of any conversation from the Gough days, but the woman’s voice, calm, quiet and respectful, had taken root with the words she’d recited. His was a ‘lonely impulse’. He remembered how it had been in the gardens by the water at Honfleur, close to the lion statues and the small fountain, his stubborn refusal to abandon ‘commitment’, and her walking away. He remembered each Sunday evening when he drove through the harbour town to collect the battlefield visitors, and each Tuesday evening when he left them at their hotel to trail after her.

Frankie McKinney had her head close to Malachy Riordan’s and there was more water for her to wipe from his forehead. Danny remembered the look of almost sad defiance as she had gazed into his face, grimaced and muttered something he hadn’t quite heard. She might have wished him well. Then she had gone. Both, too obstinate to compromise. The rain slapped him. He was cold.

He watched them and thought of where he might have been. He knew the stories of men and women, once prominent, whose fortunes had corkscrewed: they had given up what they knew and had gone to act as witness to greater suffering. He knew where he should have been.

The German cemetery was always the second to be visited. First was the American cemetery. It was outside the village of Colleville and closer to Utah than to Omaha. There were two hundred casualties on the first day at Utah, but the mayhem, chaos and suffering at Omaha dwarfed that. The edge of Omaha could be seen from the cemetery grounds. There were always American civilians here. They moved stiffly, ravaged by obesity and arthritis, on sticks and frames, and would have come to see where their young men lay, nine thousand of them. The headstones were in geometrically precise lines, crosses and stars of David in Lasa marble from the South Tyrol, northern Italy. The quiet was infectious: the noise of the sea as it broke on the beaches was deadened by the bluffs of sand that the young soldiers died trying to scale. Many were from the talisman unit – the Big Red One, 1st Infantry Division – which held the motto
No mission too difficult, No sacrifice too great. Duty First.
There were state-of-the-art museums and a magnitude of organised dignity. The visitors and the guide stepped warily here . . . and returned to the bus
.

It was a short ride only to the losers’ resting-place. It was at La Cambe, beside a fast road. There were twenty-six thousand graves and many were marked with the simple words
Ein Deutsche Soldat.
The crosses marking the graves were different from those of the victors’ dead. The guide did not point it out
.

The Germans lay beneath squat, stubby dark stones or under tablets of similar material. There were fine trees that threw shade and broke up the distances. The visitors by now would have been punch drunk with the statistics of the beaches and the strong points that the US Ranger units stormed high on the cliffs. They would have wanted to get away from the gloom of approaching evening and back into a new hotel in Caen. The guide said little but pointed out one grave. He was brief and tantalising about its significance. They were asked to remember the name Michael Wittman, an armoured ace from an SS panzer unit, buried here with the two soldiers who served with him in a Tiger Mark 6. The place had an air of dignity and despair. It lacked the nobility of the field in which the American bodies were interred, and the chance of seeing German families was remote. It was not on the tourist trail that Germans wished to follow.

The attendants wanted the gates closed, wanted to empty the parking area and close down the small building that passed for a museum. Back on the bus, the tourists were addressed by their guide. He congratulated them on their stamina and their attention during a long and upsetting day. They had earned a drink, perhaps two. There might have been a ripple of applause and the bus pulled out onto the main road. The gates closed and the darkness settled. The ghosts emerged, young men all of them, to light their cigarettes, talk about girls and beg paper for letters to distant mothers. Enmity died.

Dusty drove, as he always did, at a steady pace. He had never liked Thursday evening, but reckoned it the lifeblood of Desperate’s week. He thought of him as a friend or elder brother – a troubled man, holding back the pain. Only Dusty, who had known him for ever and had walked behind him with the Heckler & Koch, loaded with a full magazine, thought of him as a rock, but now saw the granite cracked. He feared for his friend.

It had seemed natural for him to follow Desperate out of Gough Barracks. He had not been asked to, but had never questioned his decision to go with him. The day before they had gone was sharp in his memory. He had walked into the outer office to hand in fuel receipts and the mileage list, and had heard voices through the chipboard door that led into Captain Bentinick’s room.

A man had been left bare-arsed and it was inevitable what would happen.

Sorry, Desperate, but out of my remit and taken at a loftier level.

The man would be picked up within twenty-four hours, then be beyond reach. Their security had a line into him already. The man should have been shipped out.

I’m sure you know the factors that are weighed before there is an exfiltration, Desperate. It would have been nice to lift him clear but budgetary restraints forbade it.

Had the man been abandoned because there wasn’t sufficient cash left in a relocation pot?

Let’s not get emotional. Pockets aren’t bottomless. We have to live within our means.

The man would end up with burns, bruises, and a piece of his skull blown out. Was there not a duty of care?

Never thought to hear you, Desperate, muttering that sort of mumbo-jumbo. You know what it costs: safe-house, armed protection, the new-identity stuff. Then they want their women shipped in – and later the women want to go back and do so. Then he does and he’s nutted anyway. Hardly cost efficient. It’s not considered worth the effort.

The man was liked. He was good company, and—

Hadn’t expected you’d need to be told this, Desperate, but get a grip. Nothing is ever as bad as it seems. You’re starting to feel sorry for yourself. You should take some leave and find a woman. Look, someone has to protect those wankers on the commuter trains and you’re the best at it. Another day, another dollar. On your way, please, Desperate.

A bit late. They’d learn, through back-door channels, that the man was already in the hands of their security unit. Dusty had scarpered. He’d left his paperwork and was gone by the time Danny had come out. Dusty had only ever been into Bentinick’s office to deliver a mug of tea because the girl was busy with a malfunctioning computer. There had been no family photograph on display, but rumour had it he’d been heard speaking to a daughter on the phone and had sounded almost human.

If Dusty Miller had been there when Matthew Bentinick had called him back he’d have fought it. But he hadn’t. And already, before the call, his friend had been in a state of decay. It was sad to watch a good man weaken.

It was Gaby Davies’s room. No trail of clothing across the floor, but two neat piles.

Bizarre. They had met in the corridor. Neither had picked up the phone and offered an invitation. She had come out, and so had Ralph. Both had closed their doors. He had brushed a hand across his hair, straightened his back and pulled in his belly. She had tugged at her blouse and done a wriggle with her hips. As if choreographed, they had moved forward and nearly bumped into each other. Her room was a couple of yards nearer.

The coverlet pulled back, sheets and a blanket rucked under them.

She had led, and both had understood where they were going. Neither held the initiative. So, an officer of the Security Service, with a future, was in the arms of a near-itinerant chancer. Ralph Exton had not crossed the Rubicon to be with her, and she had not seen him on the far side and waded out. It was as if they had held hands and stepped into the shallows together, had skidded and slid but held each other up. Well, something similar. They understood that time was with them, and a future might have beckoned.

He lay on his back, Gaby Davies half across him. Her head was on his shoulder and her fingernails worked in the hairs of his chest.

She said, ‘I don’t see it as two lonely people, needing to do this to feel better about themselves.’

‘I see it as going forward.’

‘Going where I want to be.’

‘He said I could be found wherever I went.’

‘What else?’

‘They’d trace me. The
mafiya
would be told and the people off the mountain. He said I’d be looking over my shoulder day and night. He terrified me. Confession time, Gaby.’

‘Tell me.’

A pause. ‘I told you half of it, maybe a third. The Russian end – my friend Timofey, who’s a devious and wicked little bastard – was where I filtered the truth.’

‘I think I realised that.’

‘It was threatened out of me.
He
did that.’

‘I’d have had the same result. Slower but the same.’

‘It makes me the great betrayer. A traitor to my friend, a traitor to the men with drills and burning cigarettes. Not to you, Gaby.’

She looked down into his face. Their eyes and mouths were close. His teeth were poor and hers imperfect. She would have bought insurance from him if he had cold-called at her door. If she had spun a hard-luck story about needing a taxi because her mum was at death’s door, he’d have cleaned out his wallet for her. ‘We’ll find somewhere. A bottle of fizz every Friday night, and you’ll put on a pretty frock, and I’ll try to look my best. It’ll be our place. Somewhere they don’t reach.’

‘We deserve each other.’

‘Right word, “deserve”. We’ll be good for each other. They’ll say in the corridor that I was a frigid bitch but developed an itch. God, the shock waves . . .’

‘Can they reach us? I think he could, that he would fulfil a threat. He’s hard.’

‘Wrong, Ralph. Bad habit of mine. I call it like I see it. There was a woman at our place, Winnie somebody. She was involved in a big one and afterwards she bugged out. Up in the Hebrides, living at a backpackers’ bunkhouse. She’s surviving, and we can . . . You’re wrong.’