Riptide (aka Bluffing Mr. Churchill) (11 page)

‘Just hit it,’ Troy mouthed at her. And two of the Western World’s greatest thinkers were gonged off.

He found himself seated between his sisters, Masha to his left, Sasha to his right. He hoped their affairs were going well. If they, in the absence of husbands who’d enlisted at the first
blast of war’s trumpet, were manless, they could be peevish beyond measure and would take it out on him. In their eyes he was still eight years old. They guarded him alternately viciously and
preciously, as though his supposed virginity might somehow balance the spent currency of their own. Worse, sooner or later, since they knew no guilt, they would want to boast to him. He never
wanted to listen. The last time, Sasha had described her unstoppable adulteries as her part of the war effort. Her mission to make English manhood happy. Those about to die got the chance to salute
her.

‘Got a girlfriend these days?’ she said without preamble.

Troy said nothing.

Masha leaned over him.

‘Didn’t I tell you? He ditched that little WPC he was with, didn’t you Freddie?’

Troy said nothing.

‘Just as well,’ said Sasha. ‘Not your type. Honestly.’

‘What is my type?’ and he regretted instantly having spoken.

‘Dunno. Just not wotsername.’

‘You know,’ said Masha, ‘I’ve forgotten her name too. Milly or Molly or something?’

At the other end of the table, where Troy dearly wished he had been seated, Rod, their father and Wells had moved on from Russia to the only topic of the moment. The war. Rod had been holding
forth for some minutes on the subject of a second front. Wells, having endured as much of his own silence as he could manage in the course of a single meal, said, ‘Surely that’s why
he’s here? Hess was sent to avert that possibility. To offer some sort of alliance and so pre-empt a second front.’

They both looked at Alex, as though this were his cue.

‘A second front?’

‘Second to North Africa, I meant,’ said Rod.

‘I know what you meant. But it seemed to me only the other day that we were fighting on half a dozen fronts at the same time, even if we do not call them fronts.’

‘Were we, I mean are we?’ Rod looked nonplussed.

‘North Africa . . . we have barely left Greece . . .’ Alex went on.

‘And we have barely begun in Crete,’ Wells added.

‘The skies above us, and the waves below us, at least above us here and below those of our people stuck in the mid-Atlantic with German U-boats on the prowl.’

‘That’s five, four and a half really – I don’t think you can have Greece and Crete in their entirety,’ said Rod unhelpfully. ‘There’s not a British
soldier in Greece, other than the POWs, and not a German one on Crete.’

‘Not yet,’ said Alex, ‘not yet.’

‘So what’s the other?’ Rod said.

‘Iraq,’ Troy said from the far end of the table.

‘Quite right.’ A nod of acknowledgement from his father. ‘Iraq it was. Five and a half fronts – if you like. However, I cannot but think of it in terms of the last war.
Eastern Front and Western Front. Sooner or later the pattern will reassert itself. And as to Hess being here: I don’t know why he’s here. I’d dearly love to be able to ask
him.’

‘Perhaps Churchill will let you,’ said Wells.

Alex tilted his bowl, scooping at the last of a thin clear soup which Troy had found so tasteless as to be unidentifiable.

‘Winston and I are no longer as close as we were. I cannot remember precisely when we last spoke, but it must have been in 1939 or thereabouts.’

‘It was just after your editorial on the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Dad,’ Rod said.

Troy would not have bothered. They all knew when it had been. The row had been volcanic.

He felt hot breath upon his ear. Polly, clutching a bowl of steaming cabbage, was whispering to him.

‘It’s that Onions bloke from the Yard, young Fred. He wants you on the blower.’

Troy ducked out, feeling his mother’s eyes upon him. Back in the study, the phone lay off the hook on his father’s desk. He picked it up and heard Superintendent Stanley
Onions’ Lancashire growl.

‘Are you free?’

It didn’t matter if he wasn’t.

‘Body for you. A Mrs O’Grady, 11a Hoxton Street, phoned in. Lodger tripped and fell down a flight of stairs. Dead as a doornail. Better check it out. You never know.’

‘You never know’ just about summed up the working lives of two detectives on the Murder Squad.

Troy made his excuses in the dining room. Saw his mother rise and throw down her napkin, coming round the table to him.

‘My dear, we have only just started the main course. Does Scotland Yard want you to starve?’

Her words all at odds with her gestures, she kissed him on both cheeks, escorted him to the door and made no effort beyond the formality of words to detain him.

‘Is he still trying to write the same article?’ Troy asked as he slipped into his coat.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And he will tie us all in knots until he has done so. At the moment the idea is that he and Wells will write it together. I’ll be amazed if it survives
the evening. They’ll be at each other’s throats before the dessert if Rod doesn’t stop stirring.’

‘He doesn’t mean to. In fact he doesn’t know he’s doing it. He just drops bricks.’

‘Your faith in innocence would be touching were it not for your odd choice of profession.’

It was odd. And she’d never let him forget it.

Cal dashed into Lippschitz Bros., slapped down two pounds ten shillings and grabbed the package the old men had for him.

‘Don’t you want to wait for a fitting?’ they yelled after him.

‘Don’t have the time!’

It was a mistake. He stood in front of the mirror in his room at Claridge’s and cursed the name of Lippschitz. The waist bagged, the jacket hung on him like something made for Cab Calloway
to sport on Lenox Avenue, and the trouser cuffs let daylight onto his socks. He looked like a clown. Damn, damn, damn. And there wasn’t a spare second to do a thing about it. He ran for a
cab.

He was wondering why Stilton had suggested a pub and not Scotland Yard or the American Embassy, wondering how he’d know Stilton if he saw him.

It was too easy. He pushed open the saloon door of the Green Man in the Strand. A man leant against the bar, chatting happily to the barman in an accent Cal could not place, one hand in his
trouser pocket, one elbow on the bar, looking for all the world as though he could hold the posture all night if need be.

‘Not so much as a whizz or a bang for five days. ’Appen it’s over,’ he was saying.

‘More like Adolf’s saving it all up for a big one. I’ve heard say the next’ll be the biggest we’ve seen.’

‘Jack, you are a miserable sod, you always look on the black side. Try being an optimist. Like I said, ’appen it’s over.’

Jack gave this a second’s thought, then slapped his hand on the bar. ‘Touch wood,’ he said, then he looked at Cal, as though waiting for his order. Stilton’s eyes
followed and found Cal.

He was a big man, as tall as Cal himself, but sixty or more pounds the heavier, and every inch the London bobby. A nondescript, voluminous brown macintosh, a trilby hat perched on the bar next
to his pint, shiny boots – polished until they gleamed like ebony – and a plump, reddish, fiftyish face, framing bright brown eyes and a big, bushy, wild moustache – the only
un-neat thing about the man. Peeping from beneath the macintosh were the folds of a dark, striped suit – better by far than the work of the fifty-shilling tailor Reininger had sent him to
– knife-edge creases in the trousers, cuffs neatly resting upon the tops of his boots, not hovering at half-mast around the ankles like Cal’s.

He straightened up. Stuck out a hand.

‘Stilton. Walter Stilton. You must be Mr Cormack.’

Cal shook the hand. Tried once more to place the accent and couldn’t.

‘Do I look that much like an American?’ he asked.

‘You said it, lad, I didn’t. Now. What’s your poison?’

‘A pint,’ said Cal, hoping it was what was expected of him.

‘Pint o’ what?’ Stilton replied, piling on the confusion.

‘What do you have?’

The barman answered. ‘Bitter, mild, stout . . .’

Bitter sounded . . . well . . . bitter. Mild sounded pathetic. Had to be stout.

‘Fine,’ said Stilton. ‘Jack, bring ’em over. Mr Cormack an’ me’ll be in the snug.’

The snug turned out to be a room the size of a closet, partitioned from the main bar by an elaborately etched glass door. He guessed that Stilton wanted privacy. The snug was empty, but then so
was the bar. Thursday evening was clearly not their rush hour.

‘I’ve not been told a lot, you understand. Just the basics. You’ll have to bring me up to date as best you can.’

Cal stared at the poster on the wall above Stilton’s head. A caricature of Hitler, all cowlick and toothbrush moustache, had been worked into a repeated motif for wallpaper – little
Hitlers spiralling down the poster – and the caption ‘Walls have ears’. He’d seen posters much like this dotted all over London in the last few days: ‘Walls have
ears’ – ‘Careless talk costs lives’ – ‘Keep Mum She’s Not So Dumb’ – and no one seemed to pay a blind bit of notice.

The barman set a pint of black stuff in front of him. Stilton put a few coppers on the table and waved Cal down when he reached for his wallet.

‘Cheers,’ said Stilton.

Cal sipped at his pint. It tasted like mud. It was so thick you couldn’t see through it. He must have pulled a face.

‘Not to your taste, lad?’

‘No, no,’ Cal lied. ‘It justs takes a bit of getting used to. So many things do.’

‘Now – to business. About this Jerry we’re after. Colonel Ruthven-Greene got on the blower to . . .’

‘The blower?’

‘Telephone, lad. I left a message for him at Broadway. He called me back. Filled me in. Told me to lend you a hand.’

Cal wondered again about the English. Reggie had ‘filled him in’. Over the telephone? A little Hitler caught his eye.

‘Scrambler, o’ course,’ Stilton added, as though he had read Cal’s mind. ‘He called me on a scrambler.’

‘Did he say where he was?’

‘Where he was?’

‘I’ve been calling him at the Savoy since Monday. I got through to him once. It’s Thursday now. We’ve lost the best part of four days.’

‘Can’t help that, lad. They didn’t bring me in till Tuesday. It was yesterday before Colonel Ruthven-Greene called me back and . . .’

‘OK, OK. I know it’s not your fault,’ Cal conceded. ‘Perhaps you had better tell me what you have to tell me.’

He listened while Stilton told him what he knew, nodded, said ‘yes’ when it seemed necessary, feeling all the time that the little Hitlers in the wallpaper were watching him, only
him, and that if he looked up quickly he would catch the beady eyes upon him.

At the end of it Stilton asked simply, ‘D’ye have any questions?’

‘Do
I
have any questions?’

‘Well. Do you?’

‘If you put it like that – yes I do. Can we find him?’

‘If he’s in London we’ll find him.’

‘That’s part of the problem. Reggie was convinced Stahl would come to London. He could be here now.’

‘He could. But not without we know about it. Now . . .’

Stilton rummaged in an inside pocket. Found his wallet, pulled out a piece of paper and stared at it.

‘Would this be anything like your man? Six foot or more, light hair, blue eyes, thirty or thereabouts. Weight about thirteen stone.’

‘Thirteen stone?’ Cal said, feeling slightly stunned by the speed with which Stilton had changed course.

‘Thirteen stone. About one hundred and eighty pounds.’

‘Six foot, blond, one eighty. Yes, that could be Stahl.’

‘D’ye reckon he could pass for a foreigner?’

‘He is a foreigner.’

‘I meant, could he be taken for Swiss if he tried to pass himself off as one? To a Swedish crew, I mean.’

‘Of course. He’s an Austrian. Both countries speak German. I don’t think the finer points of a German accent would be all that obvious to the Swedes, or to the English for that
matter.’

Stilton spread the sheet of paper out on the table.

‘’Appen this is him, then. On the seventh a Swedish merchantman was anchored overnight off Hull waiting for the tide.’

Stilton paused almost imperceptibly, changed tone, threw in the next line almost as an aside.

‘Hull’s a big port up Yorkshire way. About two hundred miles north of London.’

Well, thought Cal, I asked for the High School geography lesson, didn’t I?

‘Next morning Immigration and Special Branch sail out with the pilot to check out the crew. Matter of routine with neutral shipping, these days. One man was missing. Erich Hober, aged
thirty, signed on in Stockholm. Papers showed he’d shipped out from Danzig before that.’

‘Missing? How does anyone go missing from a ship at sea?’

‘Easy lad. They’d be within sight of land. Hull’s a good way up an estuary the size of the Thames. They’d not be at sea, they’d be in the dredger channel. A good
swimmer could slip over the side and make for the shore. If that’s what this chap did, he’d have eight hours’ start on us. He’d’ve been in London before they were even
looking for him in Hull.’

Cal had that sinking feeling. The one that had set in with Ruthven-Greene’s last phone call. Stahl had got here before him. Stahl was doing whatever he had come to London to do. And Cal
had been dumped. Fobbed off with a pensionable policeman who spoke a language that baffled him with every other sentence.

‘That could be him. It sounds like him.’

‘Good, now all we’ve got to do is find the bugger.’

Stilton downed most of his pint, a dusting of froth on the ends of his moustache, smiled at Cal. Cal left his beer untouched. Good God, they’d given him a grinning fool.

‘Where,’ he asked, ‘where do we even begin to look in a city of five million people?’

‘More like six and a half, lad, and we look in all the right places and ignore the wrong ones. I know what you’re thinking. And I wouldn’t blame you. But tracking Jerries is my
job. My speciality. I’ve narks in every immigrant quarter in the city. You’ll find the refugees tend to gravitate to the pubs and restaurants around their own exiled governments. And
the poorer they get, the further they fan out. A bit like tribes around the wigwam. I’ve Poles in Putney, Czechs in Bayswater, Norwegians in Kensington, French in Piccadilly, a few Dutch
here and there and a handful of Belgians. There’s nowhere this bloke can go and not surface sooner or later, and if he surfaces in the wrong quarter, tries a bluff too far, then they’ll
spot him, and we’ll get a tip off. A lot of these people hate each other – that’s Europe for you after all, ten centuries of hating each other – but they’ve one thing
in common. They all hate Jerry. There are times I think they hate us too – most of ’em learn just enough English to order a meal.’