The German Numbers Woman (16 page)

Her back ached, so she sat at his table. Some of his writing was in French, a simple officialese to do with weather, and no trouble to make out. Another sheet had a more puzzling content:

‘
L'homme n'a que la mot “dieu” pour essayer de voir clair en ces vestiges, pour avoir la force d'aller au plus simple et au plus juste, mais ily a autre chose. Et c'est précisement l'homme qui sait à tout moment comment on s'inquiet et à quoi on aboutit. C'est précisement la lucidité …'

And so on. Where did he get such stuff? It must have come over the radio because he couldn't write French so exactly, unless he got it from a book, though none such were hanging around that she could see. She puzzled over the sheet, and could just about make sense of it, after her O Level in the language. Was it a code, containing hidden instructions for a
coup d'état
in some Third World country? It was hardly fair of him not to have written down where it came from.

The paper underneath, in Italian, looked like press material, nothing strange about that, each paragraph headed Rome or Paris or Berlin. She picked Mrs Thatcher's name out of the item from London, thinking what a strange world he must live in when not in her presence, though it wasn't one she envied him for, floating around from one boat to another when he wasn't sitting at his silly radios or looking speechless out of the window at the horse in the field, or at a tractor going up the lane, or spying on the neighbour's house at the junction where the farmer's wife made jam.

She couldn't expect him to think about her at such times, but if he did he would surely say something about his work, hobby, interests, ambitions, the world situation, but above all his love and concern for her. It would be nice to assume he knew more about her than she could imagine, even more perhaps than she knew about herself, but if he wasn't capable of talking on this level then he was fundamentally less than she wanted him to be. At the end of everything what did it matter? Mutual love was rarely based on knowledge but on deeper factors which neither were capable of putting into words.

Perhaps it was better they couldn't, or wouldn't, or didn't, because then the spell would be broken, the mystery demystified, the relationship empty and over and out – which she didn't want. They weren't incompatible because nothing was revealed which if it were could only throw them apart. It was the unknown, the unspoken that kept you together; better they knew just sufficient about each other to stay enthralled.

She couldn't get rid of this eternal need to know, however, a perpetual knot of frustration inside her that, when it became intolerable, produced a sexual excitement only spun back to point zero after they had quarrelled and made love. Otherwise it was the desert in between.

An intense erotic feeling came into her now, but she resisted it on picking up another clutch of papers, one of which gave the weather forecast in the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara: ‘A northeasterly wind, and visibility moderate in the latter, while in the former there would be poor visibility locally in the morning with a three to four wind. No significant change expected.' How peculiar to be interested in such rubbish.

A stair creaked, a foot on a broken nut shell, maybe a floorboard, which often made a noise in the house, even though Rentokil had done its stuff and they had a certificate to prove it. Such old houses had to be alive, but the place was empty except for her, at the moment, and she hadn't heard his car coming down the lane, didn't expect him anyway till much later.

Maybe she would surprise him and have a meal cooked and laid out: lamb chops from the fridge, a couple of scrubbed new potatoes, a packet of broccoli, fruit yoghourt and sliced banana for dessert. Might be quite an adventure, to play nice little wifey. But he would be so late that maybe an omelette would be enough. She didn't believe any meal ought to take more than half an hour to get onto the table. All in all it was best not to bother, because when she had last done so they'd ended up having a fight, her fault mainly, for she hadn't considered his appreciation of her effort to be genuine, or calmly and sincerely enough expressed, when it certainly had been, coming from him.

So and so was to be arrested on arrival at Amsterdam airport. Here was something more interesting. A woman would be with him, both carrying Samsonite suitcases with false bottoms. Cocaine was suspected. Then followed their dates and places of birth, as well as times, and details as to when they had previously broken the law. The man sounded very interesting: he'd been caught for pickpocketing, embezzlement, highway robbery, manslaughter and, of course, smuggling. At the bottom of the sheet came a series of numbers and letters, followed by a note in Richard's hand saying: ‘Send through.'

She supposed he had to pick up such items now and again, he spent so much time at it. Now she knew why he was so interested and amused. A message on the following sheet told of a yacht coming out of Salonika and heading for Izmir in Turkey. Among the crew was a woman called Judy, though the cargo was unspecified and merely to be watched.

Page after page showed what clever Richard had his ears latched onto, so much turmoil for his own amusement. Now she knew why he was intent on listening, and could see it must be fascinating for a sailor to know so exactly what was going on in the criminal world. Another sheet listed the directors of The Puritan drug company, and gave the name of a boat which, luckily, wasn't one she had heard that Richard had ever been on, though she couldn't recall him mentioning any names.

If he had known people high up in government she might have thought him a spy. He would have made a good one, though he had nothing, as far as she could tell, on which he could send morse out. On the other hand he could be getting instructions, at the risk of fourteen years if he was caught, unless he had been to Cambridge and knew the Queen, like that man Blunt, or unless he took a plane somewhere and never came back. Hard to imagine him betraying his country, though a man capable of cheating on his wife might not think twice – well, three times, say – before doing so.

In the kitchen she stood a cup of coffee in the microwave, took it out at the ping, and sat on the stool to sip. What was he really up to? She also wondered about his puzzling phone calls, frequent enough to ask. ‘Put them down to business,' he said. ‘I have to make a lot, fifty or so for every job I get.' She had never seen him as a sailor yet could picture him in his jaunty and nautical mode, for he was always happy and loving before setting off for some seaport or other.

‘Want to come with me?' he chaffed between kisses.

She didn't. ‘There are two places I wouldn't be seen dead. One is in a tent, and the other is on a boat.' She liked her comfort, as much as could be got from this draughty old place.

Uneasiness told her that an obvious connection had to be made between what he took from the radio and his expectations. The coffee was scalding but her body was cold. He said he had saved a lot in the Merchant Navy, and was still living off it, plus what he had got in cash from the owners of the yachts, who paid well for his skill. ‘All on the black economy, you understand?' he told her. But she must have been blind to think so much could be earned or saved. The way they lived, in spite of what she earned at Doris's, needed far more than that.

The temperature of embarrassment was never so high as when you had been deceived, except when you deceived yourself, when it hit the roof. He was so obviously up to his neck in the smuggling trade. To think so explained more than she was comfortable in believing, but having fixed on the fact – she spoke it out loud – so much of his behaviour fell into place: his unwillingness to let her know where he was going, and what exactly he had done when he got back. The few bits he let drop had obviously been lies, for her own good, he might have said.

She would rather have found out that he was having an affair, a storm they had weathered before, on her part as well as his, because this threatened to end the only world that mattered. She had been brought up to assume, and experience hadn't told her otherwise, that all criminals were caught sooner or later. A mistake would be made, luck would run out, and whoever was involved would be rounded up and sent down for twenty years. So far she had only anguished about an accident at sea, till his reassurances, and the number of times he had gone, dulled her worries. On that score she had to regard him as indestructible, if she wasn't to practice walking along the ceiling to while away the time during the long absences.

She wanted the plain evidence to mean something else, yet only by asking could her mind be settled – which she didn't need at all, since the truth was already known. When the worst situations in life had to be lived with, those which were tolerable you hardly knew about. He didn't trust her because he was afraid of her, not for her. If he brought her out of the dark she would make a fuss, which would not only shake his resolution but might erode his run of luck. He must suppose that Fate would take a turn against him if too many people knew what he was doing, or that he knew that the person closest to him disapproved. She couldn't imagine him giving up his work (if that's what he called it) so there would be little point in letting him know what she'd found.

The discovery made her an accomplice, or accessory after the fact (as it was quaintly put, though it made the blood run cold) and from now on she would be equally responsible for his nefarious activities. There was also the morality factor of bringing drugs into the country for the ruination of poor fools who craved them, which was horrible and inexcusable. The thought of living off such gains made her angry and ashamed. She wondered what he felt about it, if anything, though she supposed he'd long since reconciled himself with his conscience – if ever he'd had one. To tell him what she had found out, and what she surmised, would certainly test his ingenuity in evading the truth.

Part Two

Spinning the Web

ELEVEN

Madagascar came in loud and clear, but that wasn't what he wanted to hear. Laura had put herself to bed, the cat comfortably installed at her feet, until he joined her and it had to go. Meanwhile he picked up a rogue station on a wavelength where it had no right to be, an Albanian emitter with a kolkhoz bully boasting of the overfulfilment of the pigshit quota for the current five year plan.

Sometimes he would alight on the pirate station of Chang the Hatchet Man, a warlord loose around the headwaters of the Yangtze River, shouting exhortations of liberation, his followers no doubt shouldering the latest heat-seeking missiles behind crags overlooking the gorge, waiting for a steamboat of tourists to feel its slow way along …

He wanted to hear Judy and her Spanish friend, would wait as long as necessary, and in the meantime contemplate sending on his key the Old Testament scriptures, a task which, at twenty words a minute and for an hour at a stretch, would occupy about four hundred days, a heavenly task indeed if he saw it as a suitable penance for eavesdropping, perfect for a recently installed mediaeval monk wearing rough garb and sitting in his cell expiating previous misdemeanours – except he couldn't believe in such a process, would only send the Bible as a gift to God but not for balancing the books of his ups and downs. Nor would he bother to tap out the New Testament, for to credit that a man could be a God seemed the worst insult to God – who in any case Howard wasn't altogether sure he believed in, though he had called his name a few times during trips over Germany.

But to hear Judy and her friend he wouldn't have to wait so long. The weather forecast from Voronezh taxed his wits, likewise that from the North Atlantic. Search and rescue messages told which if any sailors were in peril on the sea though not, dear God, that one of them was Judy. A voice in the night, calling her Spanish lover, sweetly through growling static, was as yet unheard. Their recently discovered method of communication galled her when she called to no avail, the aether making difficulties which might in the end do little for their relationship. The maleficent sunspots played bedlam with communication, much, he supposed, to Mercury's disapproval.

The cold coffee, sickening but drunk nonetheless, was Laura's last gesture before giving him up to the airwaves, knowing it was more kindly than scorning his mundane searches, convinced she would never lose him no matter how many light years he travelled.

Aware of the wavelength on which to find Judy, he even so skated across other stations so as not to come under the influence too soon. But he heard her, anyway, couldn't resist, as if he had crept helplessly into a listening position close by.

‘Miss you a lot' – clear words came out of mush that sounded like fat bubbling hectically in a frying pan. ‘I've just been on shore for a glass of vermouth. Can you still hear me, Carla? Maybe you have a problem with your transmitter.'

Carla:
‘No, it's all right.'

Judy:
‘I want to see you. Anywhere will do. Can I see you in Izmir?'

Carla:
‘Not possible.'

Judy:
‘Typical! Where are you tonight?'

Carla:
‘Ajaccio. Where you?'

Judy:
‘Naxos, hundreds of miles away.'

Carla:
‘Bloody 'ell!'

Judy:
‘It's nice to hear your voice. I really miss you. I want to be with you. I want to stay with you always.'

Carla:
‘Me too. I hear you very well tonight, as if you close. I want to kiss you.'

Judy:
‘It's terrible that we can't. I was lying on deck today in the sun, thinking about us in Corinth, when you first kissed me. It's too long ago.'

Carla:
‘Like yesterday for me.'

Judy:
‘I want to find some way of seeing you. There must be some way. The thing is, we might come your way in two weeks. They don't often tell me where we're going next, but I sometimes overhear them, or I can work it out.'