A Time to Kill (3 page)

By this time he was well in with the Lisbon Germans. His particular friend was a certain Ritter, an ex-Nazi and former naval officer, of a far superior type to the German he had met on the evening of his arrival. Pink trusted him absolutely. They used to weep together over the Europe that might have been, if ever England and Germany had been allies, and they speculated happily on whether a communism in which the commissars were gentlemen might not be a very desirable state of affairs. Poor old Pink began to see himself in a double role – as saviour of the decent world by the force of this magnificent idea, and, at the same time, as Borer from Within.

He offered, of course, no problem at all to intelligent communist agents, who would have sized him up at once as a woolly and fearless character trying to cash in on the winning side when his own was doomed. They were quite willing that he should.

Ritter must have been chosen with considerable care to guide Pink along the way he should go. He put him to work as a courier to Italy. The job seemed natural enough to Pink; after all, he could travel freely – so long as he kept clear of territories under British control – and the German exiles could not. That he should be on friendly terms with ex-fascist communists in Milan, who were surprisingly easy to dine and drink with, did not disturb him. Wasn’t it necessary to be an ally of communism in order to control it?

As soon as Pink had exhibited his remarkable facility for believing fairy-tales – and, I suppose, his talent for skulduggery of all sorts – his employers must have considered that he should be tied to them by more than loyalty. I needn’t go into all the details of the sordid and complex story. Ritter filled him up with a bit of romance exactly calculated to appeal to Pink. He was to help in the rescue of a political prisoner who was being deported from Portugal.

Pink helped all right, but found himself alone in the night, on a country road, with a stolen taxi and a dead prisoner. He cleared out instantly and on foot – at the cost of leaving his finger-prints all over the dead man’s baggage and the car. Ritter was full of apologies and explanations. He told Pink that he couldn’t expect to play with fire without occasionally being burnt, and sent him over to Tangier to be out of the way.

Pink’s life was becoming too complicated even for him. So, when he was offered the command, indeed the nominal ownership, of a neat little motor-cruiser that could do a hundred and fifty miles in one night, he refused. He was then reminded that if a set of his finger-prints, with his name and address at the bottom, were sent to the Portuguese police, he wouldn’t be able to put up much of a defence. That was true. Pink didn’t know who had fired that shot from the dark roadside, or why. He could only tell the jury the orders that Ritter had given him, and insist that he had been double-crossed. Ritter himself was out of reach. He had at last returned to East Germany and vanished.

‘And if he ever comes out,’ Pink shouted, ‘I’ll get him if I have to follow him for a month.’

I must admit that I found his longing for revenge somewhat over-dramatic and Italianate. I had still to learn that there are times when a man will kill as ruthlessly as in war, and with a hatred that is utterly unknown in war.

Well, Pink could do nothing but accept. The motor-cruiser’s papers were in perfect order; and what more natural than that Pink, as a former naval officer under a cloud, should be living on a boat and idling away his time between Tangier and the fishing ports of Spain and Portugal? He was free to go on shore when he wished, visit hotels and amuse himself. When a job had to be done, his orders were brought to him by a Spaniard, who thereupon stayed on board, ostensibly as a paid hand. He was a good seaman, said Pink, and so discreetly cheerful a character that all embarrassment was avoided.

Meanwhile the one-man secret service was pretty well played out. Pink did not even know whether his employers were communists or Ritter’s ambitious fellow-travellers or just a gang. What he was doing was plain enough – ferrying to and from North Africa people who did not wish their movements to be known. Often enough he was tempted to run into Gibraltar and throw himself on the mercy of naval intelligence officers.

‘I wonder what would have happened,’ he said to me, ‘if I had just walked in and asked someone who knew me whether I was the sort of man to commit a cold-blooded murder.’

It was enough that he should wonder. In the bottom of his heart he knew quite well that his question would have been answered by a polite silence.

One day in early March his Spanish hand, spy or supercargo – Pink never knew which he really was – came on board and gave him orders to proceed to Faro in Portugal, pick up a passenger, drop him in an inlet west of Cape Spartel, and take him back to Portugal the next night. Pink, who was then lying at Tangier, first went round the Cape to see what sort of place he was supposed to get into. His employers, he said, were no seamen. Weather and tide barely entered their calculations.

The inlet was only some ten miles from Tangier by land. There was a nasty sand-bar across the mouth, which was enough to discourage the curious, but could be crossed at the top of the tide provided the swell from the open Atlantic was not too heavy. The north bank of the inlet was obviously the property of a European. There were fields of lucerne, neatly wired, and a lot of paddocks and barns, with an attractive villa set above them on the terraced hillside. The estate looked like some sort of experimental station.

‘Holberg’s place, of course!’ said Pink. ‘He’d been working there since the early 1920s. I don’t think anyone took him seriously. Tangier is too full of people with crazy hobbies.’

Pink and his Spaniard were conditioned by that time not to open their mouths for the discussion of anything more than navigation and what they would have for dinner. Some sort of explanation, however, couldn’t be avoided. The Spaniard told him that a scientist who had been a refugee in Portugal and was now – like Ritter – returning to East Germany, was anxious to consult Holberg before he left, but had been refused a visa for Tangier. He added that Holberg had no politics at all – which agreed with all that Pink had heard about him.

‘A surly sort of cove they called him in Tangier,’ he told me, ‘though he’d break out every so often and give a binge, and as likely as not be picked up stark naked a mile down the road.’

Well, Pink collected the eminent colleague without any trouble, put him ashore on Holberg’s land and saw him escorted through the lucerne by a picturesque Berber servant in baggy pants. Pink and the Spaniard returned to their moorings in Tangier harbour, and set out the next evening to take the chap up again. He didn’t come down to the creek at the appointed time, and after midnight, when there was only an hour left to catch the tide, Pink strolled up to the villa to see what was wrong.

He had a friendly chat with the Berber servant who was on guard in the patio between the wings of the house, and knew, of course, who he was. The Berber told him to go round to the front door, ring the bell and get the butler out of bed, and deliver his message.

‘He had evidently got it in for the butler,’ said Pink, ‘but I didn’t feel like obliging him.’

On his way round the house he passed the great east window of the living-room. The curtains were not drawn tight. He looked through; and there were the two Germans as drunk as students on a Saturday night, and happily gathered round a Christmas tree. His passenger kept passing a hand under the foliage and cackling with laughter. Then he would brush something off his hand into a tray beneath the tree.

Pink was interested. Since he had every right to be where he was, he could afford to take a chance of getting into the house, and possibly into the room, unseen. The plan of the room was inviting – at any rate to a rash lunatic such as Pink. On the side opposite the patio was a row of thick, low arches in the Spanish colonial style, and beyond them two doors into the entrance hall. If one of the doors opened quietly, he could enter the room unperceived by the occupants; if it didn’t, he could always excuse himself on the grounds that he was looking for his passenger.

That villa, he said, was clean and fresh as a ship. Holberg evidently liked the night air of early spring to blow right through it. Pink accompanied the breeze through a window, and so into the entrance hall. The two doors into the long living-room were obvious. He chose one, slipped through and jumped behind a pillar. Pink, when he liked, could move like a scrum-half with leopard’s paws for boots. I’d had experience of it.

He was in cover for the moment, but as soon as one of these boozing Germans got up to leave the room he had to be seen, single or double. There was nothing to hide him but a tall, tapestried chair in the corner of the room. He moved from pillar to pillar, and so to chair. He described himself as being perfectly safe behind it. It wouldn’t occur to him that he might sneeze, or that someone might want the chair. He wasn’t blessed with that sort of imagination.

Holberg and passenger were certainly taking their hair down over the bottles. They had reverted to the noisy indiscretions of youth. That, evidently, was Holberg’s form of relaxation: to drink himself riotous once a month or so with some chosen companion. The passenger was just the man for him – it was probable that they had known each other at the university – and they were having fun with heavy technical jokes that weren’t at all easy to understand. Indeed, they were having fun at the expense of everything but themselves, the communist party included. It was frankly assumed between them that they had joined the party because it offered the only hope of revenge on the brother – yes, they called them brother Anglo-Saxons.

Then the Christmas tree came in for more attention. Now that Pink could observe it more closely, he saw that it wasn’t a tree, but branches of some North African thorn standing in a big vase, or, perhaps, potted in earth. It pleased the passenger to baptize the leaves of the thorn with wine and to giggle because something – Pink didn’t know the word he used – was remarkably resistant to alcohol.

After a bit they reached a solemn and tearful state of mutual admiration. Pink’s passenger stood up and made a set speech to his colleague in imitation of a chancellor or public orator conferring high honours upon him. The missing word, now repeated in several contexts, was clear. The things on the thorn which the passenger had attracted to his hand and baptized with wine were cattle ticks.

Now, anyone who listens to a foreign language spoken rapidly by two drunks with a heap of slurred technicalities and private allusions isn’t going to get a lot of the sense. Pink admitted that even if he had been a vet he couldn’t have given a detailed account of what he overheard; he claimed, however, to be sure of the main facts. That well-lubricated passenger had run on and on with so many repetitions that he often gave a second chance at his meaning.

It was clear that Holberg had been working for years on an anti-toxin for foot-and-mouth disease, and had managed to establish the virus in a strain of cattle ticks. The tick was none the worse; and, if removed from an infected cow when swollen with blood, it could be brewed up by some process or other, and the anti-bodies extracted from the mash. Pink’s passenger was congratulating Holberg on his discovery of a prophylactic against the disease.

That was not all. These little specks, poised on the outer tips of the thorn branches, ready to fall on the outstretched hand or any other convenient feeding-ground which passed beneath them, transmitted the virus from one to another, and increased its activity in the procession. Holberg’s ticks, dead, gave immunity; alive, they gave a most malignant form of the disease. Pink’s passenger digressed into a mock dissertation on the wonders of nature, using an empty bottle as pointer towards an imaginary blackboard.

Holberg, at last a little bored by all this academic rowdiness, opened another bottle as an encouragement to his colleague to sit down. They started to talk personalities, always in a spirit of bitterness.

‘You know how some chaps throw things about when they’ve got a skinful,’ said Pink. ‘And I like busting a bit of crockery myself so long as I’m among friends. Well, these fellows threw words instead.’

They said what they thought of the Russian scientists to whom Holberg’s process of immunization was to be passed, and circled the rest of the world with abuse. Their respect was confined to themselves and the ticks. Any fool, it appeared, could handle ticks; they were obliging enough to stay alive and wait for the chance of a meal wherever there were reasonable warmth and shade.

The two Germans lowered their voices, and the next remark that Pink heard distinctly was from his passenger.

‘You’re out of date, dear doctor! Out of date! The English are only poor Europeans like the rest of us now. Gone are the days when they could just order more meat from the Argentine.’

This made Pink particularly angry. That those days
were
gone was exactly what he resented. He was frank enough to admit to me that he could concentrate on nothing but how to smash the pair of them up and get away with it, and that he missed a vital bit of conversation.

When he had ceased to see red, he heard Holberg ask:

‘Is he a communist?’

‘As much as you and I. He believes that only through the Russians can we Germans rule the world.’

‘You’re sure he can’t go wrong?’

‘He’ll have full instructions,’ the passenger replied, ‘and he’s a competent entomologist who has lived in England for years.’

Pink waited for more, but the two drifted off into what he called beastly biological obscenities. Pink was too well brought up to appreciate two drunken scientists on the subject of sex.

He looked at his watch. He had been in the room nearly an hour, and it was very possible that his Spaniard would come up from the creek to see what had happened to him, or that the Berber servant in the patio would think it suspicious that he had not returned.

Pink’s luck was in. Holberg lurched over to the window, with some trite remark to the effect that God’s good air was better than plumbing, and the passenger followed suit. While they were so satisfactorily engaged, Pink nipped out the way he had come, and went round to the front door and rang the bell.