The Yellow Glass (3 page)

“Fifty-seven boxes and nineteen crates in my office
alone, all stamped and labelled DA FINLANDIA HANDLE WITH CARE.
 
White labels, black ink, letterpress
printed.
 
Most recent delivery 10th April
1955, ten boxes stamped and labelled as per, however,
not
letterpress but phototypeset employing individual glyphs on film
strip.
 
Also, anomaly with string . .”

“Bravo,” he broke in, “those were ours . .”

“Blue and white cotton twist on thirty-five boxes not
matched by the mid-grey and white of the . .”

 
“Move on . .”

“Saunders, Loretta, secretary at Heaviside
Import/Export engaged in wild affair with fiancée of best friend Higgs,
Florence.
 
Johnson, James, office boy,
hours of work not commensurate with those stated in the work sheet provided and
. .”

——

 
Jim Johnson seemed like a good enough name to
me.
 

“Dig this,” I’d told Gloria and Little Frank and the
rest, “we’ve got the keys to one of my dad’s motors and a few bob for the tube
if it’s not free.
 
Coffees on me and
all.”

“Cappuccinos?” Gloria asked.
 
“Iced coffees?
 
That cassata ice cream with the coloured
stripes?”

“Half an avocado pear up Mayfair, if that’s what you
really dig,” I’d said, carried away.

She ruffled my hair and pouted; the prettiest little
chick in London by a mile.

“D’I ever mention, Tel, you look just like Johnny
Ray?”

——

“Enough!”
 
My
uncle had put his hands upon my shoulders and shook me, gently.
 
“Enough, Rosa.
 
Too much information.”

I swayed on my sensible shoes.

“Sorry.
 
Was it
too much again?
 
I can’t edit it, you
know . .”

“Never mind.
 
There will be a complete debriefing later, HQ will see to that.
 
You’ve done your best, Gypsy,” he actually
smiled at me for a brief, magical second.
 
“I knew you’d come up trumps.”

I shivered, suddenly so tired that I could barely
string two words together.

“Now.
 
P . . p .
. please,” I stuttered.
 
“Tell me the
story.”

 
The Dissenters coffee bar, on the corner of
Putney High Street and the Lower Richmond Road, had brick wallpaper plastered
over one wall and egg yolk-yellow paint on another, with a black ceiling and a
red and white checked lino floor.
 
The
horseshoe shaped bar was fringed with high stools, and lushly-leaved
rubber-plants in pots punctuated the Formica counter at regular intervals.
 
I loved it and I dragged the boss off the
pavement and through the door before he had a chance to protest much.

“Must we?”
 

“Yes we must.
 
And the coffee will be good; it’s got one of those Gaggia machines.
 
I don’t want to go to an old man’s pub,
Uncle.
 
Besides, the rain’s actually
turning to sleet, look and it’ll be as dark as death in a minute.
 
I’ve had enough walking for one day.”

He looked askance at the rubber-plants, but shook out
his umbrella and sat down on a stool, nonetheless, rather out of place in his
debonair pin-striped suit and shiny shoes.
 
The Dissenters was empty and I calculated we’d have a good half an hour
of privacy before the end of the working day brought any further influx of
customers.

“I’ll get them,” I offered, going up to order from the
man behind the Gaggia.

I waited at the counter watching the man pull the great
levers and the machine belch steam into the bar, but he studiously ignored me,
while a waitress in a dirndl skirt nipped over to my uncle behind my back and
took the order, smiling unnecessarily.
 
I
went over to admire a glorious monster of a jukebox - a Seeburg with bright
yellow chrome tubes - before I plonked myself down on the stool next to my
handsome uncle.

The glass cups of frothy coffee had arrived on a
melamine tray and Dizzy Gillespie
[3]
was blowing some brain-expanding, intricate riffs on his trumpet before Uncle
Tristram got down to business.
 
He bent
his dark head towards mine and spoke just loudly enough for me to hear and
nobody else.

“You must understand, Rosa, that the more you know
about this operation, the more dangerous it might be for you.
 
That’s why I hesitate, do you see?
 
As it is, I wonder whether I should have
involved you at
all
,” he took a sip
of his coffee and his eyes collided with mine, briefly, over the rim of his cup,
“despite your abilities.”

“But why?” I barged in.
 
“Why should I be in danger?
 
Why couldn’t I have stayed at the
office?
 
Why are we running away like
this?”

He raised a warning finger, “That’s enough.
 
Or I won’t tell you anything.”

I subsided into silence.
 
I knew from past experience that pestering my
uncle would get me nowhere.

“You were to be our eyes and ears; that was our
agreement, yes?
 
You have frankly
remarkable powers of observation, Rosa.
 
As you well know.
 
And
they
were the reason we signed you
up.
 
I have absolutely no doubt that your
debriefing will uncover a wealth of useful information; stuff that you have no
idea that you possess.
 
However, at
no
time did I ask you to do anything
that might put you in any danger, now did I?”

“No, but . .”

“Mr Orchard’s secretary was offered a free holiday,
paid - unbeknownst to her - by the British taxpayer.
 
At which we slotted you in with the
secretarial agency and gave you some glowing testimonials, correct?
 
The rest was up to you.
 
You were to go in as a temporary secretary,
fulfil your duties quietly and efficiently and then leave.
 
And that is precisely what would have
happened, if not for today’s piece of rotten luck.
 
Or, to put it another way . .” he shook his
head and sighed, “right royal cock-up.”
 

And then he added, as if to himself,

“It’s not the fact that we didn’t flee the scene with
them that makes me uneasy - I mean the solicitor and the secretary simply
wouldn’t
have because the solicitor and
the secretary were, supposedly, oblivious.
 
It’s that we witnessed
their
reactions.
 
Especially Arko’s reaction.
 
Yes, whether the glassware were lethal, or
not, that’s the bit they won’t like, where
we
are concerned.”

I had no idea what he meant.
 
Would he tell me the full story, or not?
 
It seemed a jolly long time coming.
 
I’m a girl who just cannot
bear
not to know everything
immediately.
 
It’s like a kind of curse,
actually.

“Uncle Tristram, if you don’t tell me the whole story
this very minute, I shall . .”

I looked about me, desperate for something that I
could threaten him with, when inspiration struck.

“I shall change the record on the jukebox,” I said,
and I found a couple of pennies in my handbag and got up to do just that.

‘One, two,
three o’clock, four o’clock rock . .’

The opening strains of Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the
Clock’
[4]
came crashing into the coffee bar and the boss’s face twisted in disgust.

“You don’t like this rot, do you?
 
I must say I find it pretty unbearable.”

“Like it?” I said.
 
“I
love
it.
 
I love it so much that, if you don’t tell me
what on earth has been going on, I shall grab the first boy to come in here and
dance with him.
 
And if no boys do come
in, then I shall grab
you
and force
you
to dance with me.
 
How about that!”

The best thing about this spontaneous plan was that my
uncle knew me too well to dismiss it out of hand.

“Oh, Rosa,” he sighed, again, “will you please try not
to make a spectacle of yourself?”

“I
will
do
it.
 
You know I will.”

“For heavens sake, we’re supposed to be working
undercover . . .
 
Honest to God . .”
 
He shifted on his stool and looked as
uncomfortable as I’ve ever seen him.
 
I
felt quite pleased with myself; that I’d worked out how he might feel.

“Look.
 
Rosa.
 
Positively no dancing – and
I mean that, not even a suggestion of a hand-jive, or whatever they call
it.
 
Let me finish my coffee, please.”

——

 
We were out for kicks, that was all.
 
Then the ground floor window got smashed and
everything changed.
 
The girl had only
just left with the toff when the phone rang.

“It’s for you, Jim,” the office manager went, narked
at me getting a call in office hours, when I should’ve been sweeping up broken
glass.

“Is she still there?”

“No.
 
Upped and
gone this minute.”

“After her and let me know where she goes.
 
Forget the job.
 
Get the others.
 
Keep me informed all along the line,
right?
  
I’ll send some back-up.”

“What if I can’t get to a phone box?”

“You will if you know what’s best for you.”

——

 
The boss drained his cup and then clicked his
fingers at the waitress for another one in a grand manner that I hadn’t seen
anybody use in a coffee bar before, but which seemed to do the trick because it
came super fast.
 
Then he leant towards
me once more.

“They’re smuggling uranium, and huge quantities of it
at that, most probably to the Soviets, but we can’t be sure.
 
You’re aware of how desperate the world is
for uranium?
 
It’s application to nuclear
power?
 
There was the Manhattan Project
[5]
,
of course - a Pandora’s box that will never be shut again - and the amazing
things it does to steels, in terms of durability and elasticity.
 
The Russians opened the world’s first
commercial scale nuclear power station in Obninsk only last year and the
Americans have used nuclear power to propel a submarine.
 
It’s the future, whether we like it or not.”

“And they’re smuggling it in
glass
?”
 
I was breathless
with excitement.

“They’re smuggling it in a number of ways, but, yes,
glass in this instance,” his voice had dropped to a whisper, even though nobody
could possibly overhear our conversation above the racket that Bill Haley and
His Comets were making.
 
“Somebody is
extracting substantial amounts from an unknown source and we believe - and our
experience this afternoon rather backs up our theory - that they’ve found a way
for the fabric of the glass to carry increasing amounts of uranium; dangerous
amounts that may not be perfectly stable.
 
In fact, as we saw, it seems that they, themselves, don’t know how
stable or otherwise the uranium is.
 
When
you broke those glasses they panicked in the sincere belief that radiation
poisoning was on the cards.”

“But it wasn’t?” I asked.

“No.
 
We’ve been
introducing dummy crates of Vaseline glass for quite some little while.
 
Had they been as smart as you when it came to
letterpress labels and string and so forth, they’d have smelt a rat.
 
Luckily they weren’t.”
 

We were almost bumping noses now, because a group of
teen-agers had come in and made a beeline for the jukebox.
 
‘Rock Around the Clock’ had been swiftly
followed by ‘Shake, Rattle & Roll’ and the joint was beginning to jump.

“We’d had word that the big man was coming today,” he
continued, “and I put in an appearance as the tame solicitor.
 
We were checking samples prior to despatching
some extremely large orders (‘though I’d made damned sure that they weren’t the
real McCoy, not being terribly keen to get on close terms with their
baby).
 
The curtains were drawn and we
had a black cloth on the desk owing to a rather interesting phenomenon; uranium
glass glows bright green in the dark when ultraviolet light is shone on
it.
 
Fluorescence is the technical
term.
 
The more uranium, the more green
it glows.
 
Well, that’s what we were up
to when you came into the room . . and we know what
that
led to.”

“But . .” it struck me, “if the glass samples you were
looking at
weren’t
the real thing,
then how did you get them to glow?”

“Good point, Rosa.
 
Our technical man put plenty of manganese in them and that will produce
a similar kind of effect, I’m told.”

He pulled his pocket handkerchief out and unwrapped
the fragment of yellow glass so that it lay between us on the counter and we
both stared at it, as if to confirm for ourselves:
 

“Nope, no uranium in this one”.

“Which was the big man, Uncle?
 
The American or the Finn?”

“Oh, that’s a bad Yank, but he’s not the biggest
fish.
 
Arko is the big man.”
 

He folded up the piece of glass and stowed it away in
his trouser pocket.
 
Then he retrieved a
few coins and left them on the Formica counter by our empty cups.
 
He stood up to go.

 
“Arko Arkonnen
is the devil incarnate.”

I admit it, I squealed with pure excitement.

 
“Now forget I
ever told you anything, Gypsy.
 
If your
Aunt Kathleen ever hears of this, there’ll be merry hell to pay.”

I jumped off my stool and began to button up my coat,
my fingers trembling with the thrill of it all.
 

Glancing outside, I noted that darkness had fallen
upon Putney High Street.
 
Car headlights
came and went on the road, but I could still discern the sleet, streaking in
diagonal lines, through the ochre glow from the Dissenters’ neon sign.
 
I felt such a sense of unreality; half there
and half a long way away, as one feels when emerging from a theatre onto cold
London pavements, or turning the final page in a book one’s read deep into the
early hours of the morning.
 
Might the
devil incarnate
really
be on our
tail?
 
Would my Uncle Tristram and I take
another bus and then perhaps another and another, ad infinitum?
 
I did hope so; if I had to be on the run,
there was nobody else in the whole, wide world I’d rather run with.