The Untouchable (36 page)

We supplied more than strong drink and lavish foodstuffs. There was a young woman called Kirstie who travelled with us, a delicate little person with vivid red hair and porcelain skin and a marvellously refined Edinburgh accent. I do not remember where we had found her. Boy nicknamed her the Venus Fly Trap. In her way she was as dedicated to her craft as Albert was to his. She would appear in the corridor of the train after a hard night spent entertaining an eighteen-stone Estonian dispatch carrier, and look as if she had been doing no more than enjoying a pleasant hour of mild gossip with a wee friend in a tea shop on Prince’s Street. When her services were not required she would sit with me, taking sips from my whiskey flask (“What my Daddy would say if he knew I was drinking Irish!”) and telling me about her plans to open a haberdashery shop when the war was over and she had earned enough to purchase a lease. She was an unofficial adjunct to our team—Billy Mytchett would have been scandalised—and I funded her, quite generously, out of what I listed as operational expenses. I had to keep her out of the way of Albert, too, for he also was something of a puritan. I do not know what he imagined was happening on those nights when Kirstie was rejected and Danny instead slipped into the next-door compartment and did not reappear until dawn was breaking over the Southern Uplands.

We had some close shaves. There was the Turk who, after only a few minutes with Kirstie, appeared in the corridor in his underwear just as Albert was getting to work on the fellow’s dispatch
case with his bradawl and his blade. Luckily, the Turk had prostate trouble, and by the time he came back from emptying a bladder that must have been the size of a football, looking pained and suspicious in equal measure, Albert had done up the few stitches he had unpicked, and I was able to convince Abdul that of course my man had not been tampering with his bag but, on the contrary, was merely making sure that it was all intact and sound. In some instances, however, we had to employ extreme measures. I discovered I had a talent to threaten. Even when there was little real damage we could have done, there was something in the smoothly suggestive way I delivered the menaces that proved gratifyingly persuasive. Blackmail, especially the sexual kind, was more effective in those straidaced times than it would be now. And it was more effective still when Danny and not Kirstie was the bait. There was an unfortunate Portuguese, I remember, a middle-aged fellow of aristocratic bearing by the name of Fonseca, who came a terrible cropper. I was taking a long time over his papers, having only a rudimentary grasp of the language, when I became aware of an alteration in the atmosphere in the compartment, and Albert coughed and I looked up to find Senhor Fonseca, in a dressing gown of the most wonderful blue silk, blue as the sky in a Book of Hours, standing in the corridor, watching me. I bade him come in. I invited him to sit. He declined. He was courteous, but his otherwise sallow face was grey with anger. Danny, who had spent a strenuous couple of hours with him earlier, was sleeping in a compartment further along. I sent Albert to fetch him. He came in yawning and scratching his belly. Having told Albert to go out into the corridor for a smoke, I sat for a moment in silence, considering the toe of my shoe. Such pauses, I found, always had an unnerving effect on even the most outraged of our—victims, I was going to say, and I suppose it is the only word. Fonseca began haughtily to demand an explanation, but I interrupted him. I mentioned the laws against homosexuality. I mentioned his wife, his children—“Two, is that right?” We knew all about him. Danny yawned. “Would it not be best,” I said, “if what has happened tonight, everything that has happened tonight, were to be forgotten? I guarantee you absolute discretion, of course. You have my word as an officer.”

Black rain was falling out of the darkness outside, flying raggedly against the lighted window of the speeding train. I imagined fields, crouched farms, great trees thick with darkness heaving in the wind; and I thought how this moment—night, storm, this lighted, hurtling little world in which we were sealed—would never come again, and I was pierced with strange sorrow. The imagination has no sense of the inappropriate. Fonseca was staring at me. It struck me how much he resembled Droeshout’s portrait of Shakespeare, with his domed forehead and concave cheeks and watchful, wary eyes. I squared the documents on my knee and slipped them back into the dispatch case.

“I’ll have Private Clegg here sew this up,” I said. “He’s very expert; no one will know.”

Fonseca gave me a queer, wild look.

“No,” he said, “no one will know.” He turned to Danny. “May I speak to you?”

Danny did one of his bashful, shoulder-rolling shrugs, and they stepped out into the corridor, and Fonseca looked at me again over his shoulder and slid the door shut behind them. Presently Albert Clegg returned.

“What’s the matter with the dago, sir?” he said. “He’s down there by the lav with Perkins. I think he’s crying.” He gave a snuffly little laugh. “See that thing he was wearing, that blue thing? Looked like a frigging ponce in it.” He grimaced.” “Scuse the language, sir.”

Three hours later we arrived, pulling into Edinburgh under a soiled and angry sky. I sent Clegg to wake Fonseca. In a moment he was back, looking green, and said I had better come and see for myself. The Portuguese was on the floor of his compartment, wedged in the narrow space beside the made-up bed, a large section of his Bardic pate shot away and his magnificent blue gown spattered with blood and bits of brain. A pistol had slipped from his grasp; I noticed his long, slender hands. Later, after our people had removed the body and cleared up the mess and we were on our way back to London, I asked Danny what Fonseca had said to him in the corridor; he made a wry face and looked out at the sodden landscape through which our troop-laden train was crawling.

“Told me he loved me, that sort of thing,” he said. “Asked me to remember him. Soppy stuff.”

I watched him carefully.

“Perkins, did you know what he was going to do?”

“Oh, no, sir,” he said, shocked. “Anyway, we can’t worry about that kind of thing, now, can we? There’s a war on, after all.” Such clear, clean eyes, glossy brown, with bluish whites, and long, sable lashes. I recalled him, in his vest, dropping on one knee beside Fonseca’s body and tenderly lifting the poor fellow’s hands and folding them on his bloodstained breast.

I passed on to Oleg anything from the diplomatic pouches that I thought would be of interest to Moscow—it was not easy to tell whether this or that choice morsel would excite the Comrades or provoke one of their sulky silences. I do not wish to boast, but I think I may say that the service I provided from this source was not inconsiderable. I gave regularly updated estimates, more or less reliable, of the disposition and readiness of the various enemy forces ranged along Russia’s border from Estonia to the Black Sea. I supplied the names and often the whereabouts of foreign agents at work in Russia, as well as lists of anti-Soviet activists in Hungary, Lithuania, Ukrainian Poland—I had no illusions as to the likely fate of these unfortunate people. Also, I ensured that Moscow’s dispatches remained inviolate by spreading the story that the Soviets’ own pouches were booby-trapped and would blow up in the face of anyone who tampered with them; a simple ruse, but surprisingly effective. Moscow’s Bomb-Bags became a staple of Department mythology, and stories even began to circulate of inquisitive couriers being found sprawled under a snowfall of tattered documents with their hands and half their heads blown off.

What Moscow was most interested in, however, was the flood of signals intelligence coming out of Bletchley Park. I had access to a great deal of this material from my desk at the Department, but there were obvious gaps, where some of the more sensitive intercepts had been withheld. At Oleg’s urging I sought to get myself assigned to Bletchley as a cryptanalyst, citing my linguistic skills, my gift for mathematics, my training as a decoder
of the arcane language of pictorial art, my phenomenal memory. I confess I rather fancied myself as a Bletchley boffin. I urged Nick to put in a word for me with the mysterious friends in high places he claimed to have, but without result. I began to wonder if I should be worried: that trace against me from my Cambridge days, that little five-pointed red star that Billy Mytchett’s researchers had spotted in the firmament of my files, was it still twinkling there, despite Nick’s promise to have it extinguished?

I went to Querell and asked if he would recommend me for a transfer. He leaned back on his chair and put one long, narrow foot on the corner of his desk and looked at me for a moment in silence. Querell’s silences always carried the implication of suppressed laughter.

“They don’t take just anybody, you know,” he said. “These people are the very best—really first-class brains. Besides, they’re working themselves to death, eighteen-hour shifts, seven days a week; that wouldn’t be your kind of thing, would it?” I was walking away when he called after me. “Why don’t you talk to your chum Sykes? He’s a power in the land up there.”

Alastair when I telephoned him sounded at once vague and hysterical. He was not glad to hear from me.

“Oh, come on, Psyche,” I said, “you can take an hour off from your crossword puzzles. I’ll buy you a pint.”

I could hear him breathing, and I pictured him, peering desperately into the receiver like a trapped rabbit and running stubby fingers through his spiked hair.

“You don’t know what it’s like up here, Vic. It’s a bloody madhouse.”

I drove up in one of the Department cars. It was early spring, but the roads were treacherous with ice. I crawled into Bletchley at twilight in a freezing fog. The pair of guards at the gate were a long time in letting me through. They were young men, pustular, the backs of their necks shaved and sore looking, their caps seeming much too big for their narrow, hollow-templed heads; as they examined my papers, frowning and scratching their downy jaws, they might have been a couple of schoolboys worrying over their homework. Behind them the huts squatted in the fog, and here and there a window was weakly aglow with
sallow lamplight. Alastair met me in the canteen, a long, low shack smelling of boiled tea and chip fat. A few solitary souls were scattered among the tables, slumped like guys over mugs of tea and full ashtrays.

“Well, you chaps are really sprawling in the lap of luxury up here, aren’t you,” I said.

Alastair looked wretched. He was thin and stooped, and his skin had a greyish, moist patina. When he lit his pipe the match shook in his fingers.

“It’s pretty rudimentary, all right,” he said, a little huffily, as if he were head of house and I had cast aspersions on the school. “We’re promised improvements, but you know how it is. Churchill himself came up and gave us one of his pep talks—vital work, listening in on the enemy’s thoughts, all that. Ugly little bloke, up close. Hadn’t a clue what we actually do here. I tried to explain a bit of it but I could see it was going in one ear and out the other.” He looked about the room and sighed. “Funny,” he said, “the noise is the worst thing, those ruddy machines rat-ding and sputtering twenty-four hours a day.”

“I see some of the material you produce,” I said, “though not all.” He gave me a sharp look. “Listen,” I said, “let’s go to the pub, this place is awful.”

But the pub was not much better, although there was a fire. Alastair drank beer, dipping a prehensile lip into the suds and sucking up cheekfuls of the watery, warm brew, his adam’s apple hobbling. He wanted to know how the war was going. “I don’t mean the propaganda they put in the papers. What’s really happening? We never hear a thing, up here. Bloody ironic, isn’t it.”

“It’s going to be a long one,” I said. “Years, they say; maybe a decade.”

“Christ.” He cupped his forehead in his hands and gazed gloomily at the patch of ringed and scarred counter between his elbows. “I won’t last it.” He lifted his head and looked about cautiously. “Victor,” he whispered, “when do you think they’ll come in?”

“They?”

“You know what I mean.” He smiled anxiously. “Are they ready, do you think? You’ve been there. If they break …”

“They won’t break,” I said. I put a hand on his arm. “Not when they have us to help them: Boy, me … you.”

His stuck his mouth into his beer again and took a long swallow.

“Don’t know about that,” he said. “Me, I mean.”

We stayed for an hour. He would not talk about his work, no matter how many pints I plied him with. He asked about Felix Hartmann.

“Gone,” I said. “Back to base.”

“His choice?”

“No; he was recalled.”

That brought an awkward silence.

Alastair was due to start his shift at nine. When he climbed down from the stool he was unsteady on his feet. In the car he sat slumped beside me with his short little arms tightly folded, sighing and softly belching. At the gate, a new guard detail, who looked even younger than the first pair, peered in at us and, seeing Alastair, waved us through.

“Not supposed to do that,” Alastair said thickly. “I’ll have to report them in the morning.” He giggled. “We might have been a couple of spies!”

I offered to drop him at his quarters—it was bitterly cold by now, and the blackout was in force—but he insisted that we stop before we got there, for he wanted to show me something. We pulled up at one of the larger huts. As we approached the door I heard, or rather felt, through the soles of my shoes, a muffled, thunderous din. Inside, the decoding machines, bronze-coloured, each one as big as a wardrobe, were churning and pounding in a kind of comic earnestness, like big dull foolish animals ranged about a circus ring performing their frantic, monotonous tricks. Alastair pulled one of them open to show me the rows of wheels spinning and clacking on their rods. “Ugly beggars, aren’t they,” Alastair shouted happily. We went outside again, into the burningly cold air. Alastair lost his footing and would have fallen over if I had not held on to him. For a moment we grappled unhandily in the dark. He smelled of beer and unwashed clothes and old pipe smoke.

“You know, Psyche,” I said in a fervent voice, “I wish they could find a use for me up here.”