The German Numbers Woman (19 page)

Following the address and the date he sent: ‘Dear Howard' – and stopped. His morse was crisp and clear. The beginning always did sound musical, fresh on the ears, notes evenly spaced, rhythmical, in the best professional style – a concert fist, as they used to say – but to send morse for half an hour without cease and not to make an error would be something of a feat, though he could stop the tape recorder whenever he did so or his hand grew tired.

Even so, thumping out banal generalities by such a method hardly fitted the effort that went into it, or the uniqueness of the means used. He wound the tape back, reached for a pencil so as to write the letter first and send it from sight as a long message. That way he would be less likely to make mistakes, or give out anything he regretted.

Yet that also was cheating, and he couldn't get further again than ‘Dear Howard,' wondering why he had suggested such a revealing and difficult means of communication.

He threw the paper away, set the recorder going, and reached for the key. ‘Dear Howard, for the last week or so I've intended calling on you again, but I've been much of the time in the sort of mood that wouldn't even let me leave the house.'

Not a good start, but it would have to pass. ‘Not knowing what to do with myself I spent several hours a day at the radio, and usually got something interesting to ease the mind. To sum up, there was diplomatic screed on the eighteen-megacycle band, as well as government stuff knocking around on various other wavelengths. I have to be careful of course to shred the stuff afterwards, having no further use for it. I don't suppose you'd care to see it, either, if I sent it to you, which I won't unless specifically requested. This obsessive attachment to radio stops me going bonkers.

‘You do it for different reasons, I know, but it stops me thinking of things which aren't pleasant to dwell on. What are they? Well, how I got to the stage of life I'm at now. After I'd had enough of the Merchant Navy there were lots of shore-related jobs I could have taken. I might even have gone on a course and become a teacher in a comprehensive school for the rest of my life, but that seemed too much like a living death, and in any case what would a character like me have to teach? I'm an all or nothing sort who, when I end up with nothing, as I sometimes have, diverts into something easy to do, and has such rewards on the payment side that at least I can have a good life, and enjoy myself while it lasts.

‘And there's the rub, you might say. Nothing good goes on forever, only the ordinary, the humdrum does that, and who wants that kind of existence? Your life isn't anything on those terms, with your unique disadvantage. But my life floats along between one high moment and another, each moment (which might last a fortnight) packed with sufficient excitement to keep the adrenalin short-circuiting very well between times.

‘The boat trips are what I'm talking about. In the last two years I've been to the Med a couple of times, across to Holland more than once, also to the Canaries and down to Madeira, to pinpoint a few. I mix with people I wouldn't be seen dead with on shore, but it's the sort of trade in which one can't choose one's companions, and since I'm paid well I can hardly complain.

‘In spite of the ideal life I'm telling you about, I can't but think there's a better and more fulfilling one waiting for me somewhere. Why I'm going on about it I don't know, but at least it's in morse and is filling the tape, exclamation mark! though I realise it may be of no interest to you at all. Doing such top secret work as I do, which I can't even talk about to my wife, makes what you might call a lonely man out of me, but I like that, because it matches perfectly with my temperament, whatever of course that is.

‘Having made your acquaintance improves my situation, because-at least there's someone I can talk to without inhibition or limit. Maybe we are equally cut off from the world in our different ways, when we're not at the radio and in touch with more than anybody can realise.

‘It's a different world, and that's the attraction. I often wonder when the point came in my life that made me what I am today. The more I dwell on it, the less I can decide what it was. This suggests to me, perhaps as an easy way out, that such a decision must have taken place before I was born.

‘In other words, it's in the genes. We're born more than made is what I mean, and what I've thought for as long as I've been capable of thinking – or asking questions – which may not go that far back. In one respect you are lucky because you can say exactly where and when that special something happened which made you what you are today.

‘Forgive such rambling. The tape runneth over. I'm not stuck to the radio every hour God sends. Another exclamation mark! I walk over the hills, and through the woods when the paths aren't knee-high in mud. Sometimes I drive in the Bracebridge direction and call at the pub where I took Laura for a drink – to whom best wishes, by the way. Occasionally I take Amanda to London, where she does a bit of shopping, and we enjoy a night out.

‘But it's time to stop. Wrist's aching like the devil, as you must twig from the number of erasures. Let's meet. Call you soon. Best regards. End of tape, which alas can't be endless, Richard.'

Sweat plastered his hair, from the effort of prolonged sending. He'd pumped more than expected, or that he had intended, felt uneasy at having let the words sparkle out and not thought once of censorship, and hoped he hadn't revealed too much of himself. Spinning the tape back he played it through to hear what had been said. Amanda knew all of it and more already, but it would be interesting to know what Howard guessed on listening in.

The replay, all the same, seemed to concern someone quite different, not another person exactly, but a sidestepped version of himself who both puzzled and fascinated. A fool in the grip of cosmic forces couldn't avoid being who he didn't want to be.

He smiled however at the similarities which couldn't be disowned. Tapping out more such missives would illuminate himself to himself, both versions eventually turning into one person so that he would finally know. He might even find a clue as to what he wanted to do in life, and then do it.

Howard, a man made wise by his inability to know what went on in the physical world, would be his correspondent. Whatever comments came in return should be interesting, if you thought about it, because a person was just as blind when it came to dealing with the world as was a man who had lost his sight, though the man without normal vision would have known it all along, and had no illusions about the benefits of seeing. Therefore he developed alternatives of which a man with eyes could not conceive.

A man who had eyes to see blundered around without thought, without vision, imagining he saw everything, whereas in many cases he was more blind than the blind man. The man who was blind, due to impacted sorrow over the years at not being able to see everyday details of the world – either to love, hate or wonder at – had cultivated, in order to stay sane, a deeper connection with the human heart because he moved around in subterranean emotional strata with more surety of perception. Even though he might not be able to put the experience gained into words, he developed an instinct which allowed him to endure in equilibrium – something all of us wanted to do – and bring important matters to the surface now and again when it was important, to himself and even others, to do so.

Richard conjectured as to whether such thoughts came because a change was taking place. They seemed benign and helpful, whatever was happening, bringing calm to his recently disordered condition. If a blind man could get on so well in the world, without being a burden to it, and be even less a burden to himself, how was it that he (though the state was not apparent to Amanda or others) could be harrowed at times with confusion and anxiety?

On the other hand that's not me at all. I'm making it up. It's a game. If I didn't take life as a game I couldn't exist another minute. I'm playing with a phase of mind that has no connection to me, which comes easy because whoever I'm with I have to pretend to be somebody I'm not; neither with those on the jobs I go to, nor with Amanda, nor with Howard and Laura. If a third personality shoulders its way in to claim me I ought not to be surprised. Two, three, or even a dozen could make no difference when I've never been the sort of solid man with an innocuous career, a character of substance and probity, honest in every fibre, plain to myself and to everyone with whom I come in contact.

That's the sort of person his father had wanted him to be, but then he would, wouldn't he? The old man has never been happier than when a ‘person of substance' just one notch of the ladder above, complimented him on his work or merely gave him the time of day. You could expect the sons of people like that to be anything but certain of their place in life, lone wolves and wanderers all, spoiled and disloyal, beholden to no one yet itching to make money and get rich, camouflaged jackals moving around the periphery of the jungle and ready to pounce on anything easy, having long since learned to avoid the traps which society sets in the form of law and order. Partially blind Richard may be, but his eyes had served him well enough up to now.

Since there had to be a reason for everything, such thoughts might come as a warning. He would take more care, check and recheck (and check again) the details of every seagoing operation, make the most of the time allowed instead of slinging back drinks beforehand as a form of celebration for the success of what they hadn't yet pulled off. They relied on him to be painstaking, and he would be, for their sake but most of all for his own.

Shadows dimmed the room, and when it was dark he cut himself off even more from the world by drawing the curtains. Lighting a cigarette, he sat at ease in the armchair. A morning phone call had told him to be in Glasgow by tomorrow evening. Something ‘big' was on, maybe a delivery from one of the East European fishing ships beyond some remote point of the Hebrides. Or they would beat their way out at night on a high powered yacht to meet one even as far off as St Kilda. To intercept spot-on they would have to navigate by homing in on the ship's transmitter, a radio beacon to be used only sparingly, and by changing wavelength every ten minutes, so that no suspicious interception could pin them down.

All his expertise in radio would be called on to get them to the exact meeting point, and his mood in the days beforehand swung between anxiety and excitement. He wanted to be off, and joining the fray, to be on deck at night in uncertain weather (it was invariably bloody awful) earphones clamped and senses well tuned as he gave directions to the man at the wheel.

Such primitive excitement was hard to come by. A head on meeting with a distant ship showing the faintest of lights, their smaller boat beating a way through wild and inhospitable seas, was always an achievement. It was a medium in which the half dozen crew knew how to survive, having been in the game so long that if they couldn't do it neither could anyone else.

While anti-drug agencies joined efforts against those smugglers from South America and the Middle East, the door was open – and had been for years – from Russia and Eastern Europe. The main transit routes flowed from the central Asian republics and converged on Moscow, then spread by barge down the Don and Dnieper rivers to the ports of Rostov and Odessa. Or stuff went north along the Dvina to Archangel, then by Onega and across the Kola peninsula to Murmansk. Nobody had known about that arm of the business, or they hadn't been able to do much to stop it.

In the trade it was known as the Snowflake Route, and boats setting off from such places unloaded their cargo by devious and indirect means throughout Western Europe. What began as a trade had turned into an industry, and too many were making a living for it to be dented, even if the odd person was caught or the occasional boat stopped.

Morality, he reflected, knows no bounds. Nor, to be realistic, does necessity, because if it wasn't drugs it would have to be another commodity, and if there was no something else: ‘I would have no way of earning a living. Evil is in the eye of the beholder, and though I am not a beholder anymore, but the activist, I can still take the place of one and see myself for what I am, or for what others think I am, and laugh.'

He only ever felt guilt when he went north to see his father, and played at being the son of a disappointed man. Last time he had taken a Leatherman tool knife, and half a pound of duty-free Gold Block tobacco. In spite of himself old Len had been unable to resist being pleased as he took the knife from its small leather case and opened the various implements, from the main blade to metric screwdriver. ‘I can throw my tool set away now.'

‘You can, Dad.'

‘And you've brought me a good smoke as well. I can let myself go for a month. The old puff-stuff keeps me happy. A bit too expensive for me to smoke all I'd like.' He lived in a bachelor ground-floor flat in Southport, and Richard had called because he could hardly avoid it, down from Glasgow on his way to London.

‘Still messing about in boats, are you?'

‘I make a living.' He had already told him that the radio officer job had gone bang. As you can see from what I've given you, you stupid old bastard.

The presents in his hands, Len stood as if he might throw them into the fire. ‘Big ships are better. You were doing well as radio officer.' He put the things down. ‘I'll make you some tea, anyway.'

Instead of following his tall well-built figure into the kitchen Richard looked around the room, at the pathetic artifacts on shelves and dressers, and photographed groups of becapped putty-faced pipe-smoking men on decks or quaysides. The photograph of his mother, who had died of cancer when he was sixteen, had been set in the grandest frame, the enlargement of one taken on Form by beach when she had, apparently, been happy. Not much use looking at her, since she had been so long gone.