Wicked Autumn (7 page)

False IDs were a part of his life, and he quickly began to master the ability to lose himself completely in his various roles. It was the only way to keep it all straight in his mind. He wondered sometimes if he’d missed a career on the stage. But the incentive to maintain a false identity was so much more than matinee entertainment, and the driving force, the need to stay alive, was incentivizing in the extreme. He’d played the roles of bank manager and schoolmaster, of politicized student and cagey estate agent and dodgy car salesman. No one had suspected a thing. He still wasn’t sure whether to be proud or ashamed of that.

A job with Five was often boring, often heart-stopping, most often requiring an ability to wait endlessly. September 11 raised the stakes considerably. In response, they now had SOCA, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, Britain’s version of the FBI, an organization, merged from others, whose priorities were drug trafficking and organized immigration crime. Terrorists were not a stated target, but it was generally impossible to differentiate dirty money from the unclean uses to which it was put.

It was interesting work on some days; mostly, it was just his job. The way other people worked at a dry cleaners, he went to work for MI5 every day. He might have gone on forever had it not been for the Russian.

*   *   *

His approach now never went unnoticed, and he reveled (modestly, he hoped) in the happy greetings and the goodwill of the people he had promised to serve. The fresh air, the beguiling smoky smell of early fires hanging over all, the camaraderie …

It was a peaceful scene, only now broken by a loud noise, as of a loud trumpeting … surely not—yes—

Wanda’s foghorn voice could be heard, as if from a great distance. Moses rallying the Israelites.

“Come
on
, people! For the love of
heaven
! We don’t have all day! Shift it! Shift it! Oh, hello, Vicar. Just in time. We need a big strong man like yourself to…” Eyelashes working overtime, she launched into a tedious and complicated request having to do with trestle tables and a placard advertising the location of the tea tent. Today she again wore her brogues, and another outfit that might have been issued by the Palace, this time in deep violet. A large, old-fashioned brooch representing a bumblebee seemed to crawl toward her left shoulder. Max good-naturedly allowed himself to be volunteered, if only to keep her quiet for a moment, and give someone else a respite.

She plowed on to other fields of endeavor, ignoring anger or opposition as they were encountered, occasionally bending an ear to the urgent request of an underling. She was bold and decisive in her decisions, or so her self-satisfied expression suggested, apparently missing the looks of bafflement and frustration she often left in her wake. She paused in her supervisory duties on one return pass only long enough to lean in confidingly and say, “Would you believe it, Vicar? Mrs. Percy has dropped out of the rota for the Pickles and Preserves table. ‘Death in the family,’ she says.” Wanda sniffed. It was clear that no death in Mrs. Percy’s tribe would be cause for protracted sorrow. “That could wait, couldn’t it?” she demanded. “I mean, they’re not going to get any
warmer
if she drops everything and races to the bedside, are they?”

Max, taken aback, allowed as how they probably were not.

“Still…”

“Still nothing!” Wanda blared. “Besides, funerals are for the living. Now that’s interesting…” She seemed to change topics, distracted by something seen in the distance. Her eyes took on the cast of an old sailor seeing a mythical, long-sought-after whale. “Well, well,” she said slowly. “
Someone
will need to be told.”

“What’s that?” asked the Vicar, himself distracted by a splinter that had found its way painfully into his thumb.

“Oh, nothing to bother you with, Vicar, at least not yet.” Here she turned on the spigot marked “Flirtation with Handsome Vicar” and fiercely batted her eyes. He noticed she once again had lined her lashes, with none too steady a hand, using some murky and dark substance, like the leavings found in a coal scuttle. “I have to follow the dictates of my conscience, I suppose,” she added. But she frowned, as if for once she was not sure what her conscience might dictate. Then, recalling that she had a Fayre to run, and no doubt an insurrection or two to quell, she visibly composed herself, adjusting the fingers of her cotton gloves one by one, pressing the cloth into the valleys between her pudgy digits.

*   *   *

Max had returned to his assigned chores when, some minutes later, Wanda shot briefly into view again. “Time to man the braces!” she cried. Max, who had never expected to hear anything like that outside of a Horatio Hornblower novel, grinned across the trestle table at Guy Nicholls, a new fellow recruit in Wanda’s War, as it was now being called.

“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” muttered Guy under his breath.

Max shook his head.

“Wrong battle.”

“Do you think she makes a distinction? All life’s a battle. She seems to meld the different branches of service, too.”

Wanda briefly disappeared down the side of a small hillock, a faint cry trailing her like a flag: “I swear, you lot couldn’t run a whelk stall without me!”

No doubt this was true. It was strange, Max reflected, how this truth didn’t go very far toward endearing her to those who hastened to do her bidding.

CHAPTER 8

Harvest Fayre II

Max had to credit Wanda in this much: the Fayre was an enormous undertaking, and as it got underway, the seams involved in putting together such a large display virtually had disappeared.

Stalls seemed in the past half hour to have exploded in number. Those selling home produce predominated, as farmers came in from miles around for this event. There were also stalls selling knitwear (Lily’s offerings putting all others in the shade) and children’s wear. Teas and coffees and herbs were available in sweet-smelling abundance, and secondhand toys and games changed hands for probably the fifth time in a generation. There were displays of wrestling and tests of strength for the men, and antiques that verged on rubbish for sale, and rubbish from attics that might include a pirate’s treasure—one never knew. The siren call of the undiscovered hoard hung thick in the air, and Noah Caraway—round, balding, ebullient—reigned in that department, offering lamps with mismatched lampshades, rusting garden equipment and furniture, tablecloths with three matching napkins, dog-eared books and photo albums of the long-deceased—sadly, with no relative left to claim them, these studio portraits and snapshots became mere curiosities, reduced for quick sale.

Max gave Noah a friendly wave as he passed. He had his own rubbishy things to unload, and was afraid of collecting someone else’s, like lint, if he came too near. In the distance, the church choir was launching into “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” This song never being one of his favorites, Max veered left and walked on, walked on with hope in his heart, until he came face-to-face with Wanda’s soul mate: the Major.

The Major was in theory manning a stall (he seemed to be selling ball bearings, but Max felt overall that that couldn’t be right), but in actuality he was reading a book as he perched on his ubiquitous shooting stick, pointedly ignoring all inquiries of passersby as to his wares. But as Max approached, he made an exception, for the Major approved of the “New Padre,” as he always called him. “A fighting man to his fingertips; you can always tell,” he would say. In the Major’s estimation there was no higher tribute: it was as if Max could fly.

“It’s a biography of King Æthelfrith,” he told Max now, flipping the book over to display the cover. “Mighty warrior—gave the Britons a jolly good trouncing. Interesting note for you, Padre: at one point he killed the monks who were helping the Britons by praying for them. Hah! Æthelfrith. Not a name you’d want to attempt with a lisp, eh?” In a typical non sequitur, he added, “‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’—what a load of American codswallop.”

The Major was a great rumbling bear of a man given to using words like
trouncing
and
balderdash
, as if he were forever starring in some drawing-room comedy of the 1930s. Rather than say, “Where are you?” he would demand to know, “What are your coordinates?” But he was almost a Dickensian character, wearing brocaded waistcoats in all seasons and with a Rudolph-like red nose that could nearly light the way in the holiday pageant. He had dark eyes, close-cropped white hair, a flourishing mustache, and a somewhat gray complexion. He was still able to wear the belts of his youth, only now they hugged the underside of a prominent paunch rather than circling a waist rendered taut by daily sit-ups. Today’s wide belt, slung low on his hips, gave him the appearance of a portly gunslinger.

It was a source of some consternation and puzzlement to the Major, if not to Wanda, his wife, that he’d never seen “action on the front lines,” as he put it. But a senior officer had summed it up, succinctly if obliquely, in one of the Major’s official evaluations: “The object of any campaign being to avoid a complete rout, it is recommended Major B-S be confined to a behind-the-scenes role—very behind.” There was always an air about the Major of someone self-important, who was aware if baffled by the knowledge that the rest of the world did not share his self-assessment. Listening to him on any subject quickly made one conscious that time was not always fleeting, but could move at a tortoise-like pace. Max often felt sorry for the man—for his evident fall from what he had believed to be a position of influence in the world.

Sensing one of the Major’s more predictable tirades coming on, Max gave him a neutral smile, struggling to hide the “all is lost” look of dismay in his eyes.

“Æthelfrith wouldn’t have stood for it, I can tell you that,” continued the Major. “‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’—Pah! But you wouldn’t have to ask nowadays, would you? All of them pouring out of the closet, in tights and spangles. What this country’s come to. Sad end to an empire, what? Learned nothing from the Romans or the Turks, did we?”

Max again made no response, although he was rather wondering what the Turks had to do with anything. The Major’s right-wing views were too well known for Max to wish to invite a reprise by showing so much as a blink of interest. He noted, not for the first time, that the Major was excessively loquacious when his wife was out of range. Probably it was the only chance he got to talk uninterrupted.

“What we need,” the Major was saying now, “is what your St. Augustine would call a ‘just war.’”

Max, surprised by the reference, thought there might actually be something more going on beneath the Major’s buffoonish, pukka sahib-ish, drag hunt–loving exterior. A thought dispelled by the Major’s next comment.

“Of course, not ‘just’ any war qualifies. ‘Just war.’ Get it?”

Max pretended to spot a long-lost parishioner in the crowd. With murmured apologies, he hared off, just as the Major was getting started on the hallucinogenic waywardness of elected officials.

It was an escape, however, from the fire into the flames. Max ran, in his panic, straight toward a stall manned by a lone local author. Too late he noticed the rabid eye of Frank Cuthbert (husband of Mme Lucie Cuthbert, who operated La Maison Bleue). Frank was offering an unwary public his self-published book—a long, rambling, crackpot pamphlet, really—on the history of the region, spliced with dubious, hand-drawn maps of local walks that, if followed closely, could land the user miles from civilization. Since the book had been published ten years previously, and everyone within a thirty-mile radius had already been strong-armed into buying a copy, it was hard to justify the winsome smile of anticipation and optimism on the author’s moonish, apple-cheeked face as he sat surrounded by half a dozen boxes of unsold copies. He wore his usual tweed sports jacket over a dark shirt open to a cranberry cravat. His black beret perched at a rakish, authorly angle, he twinkled at the Vicar from behind, literally, rose-tinted glasses. Everything about him, including the biblical white beard, seemed to be an unconscious parody of the stereotypes of the literary genius. That his books sold by the handful rather than the thousands diminished his belief in his destiny not one jot. With Frank, bookselling was a blood sport.

Now smiling at Max, Frank emitted something like a high-pitched chortle that made him sound quite mad. It was widely felt that Frank
was
more than a little mad, but in that harmless way of many writers with a book to sell. At his feet sat Sadie, a beautiful bichon frise whose spotless white coat gleamed in the sunlight. She seemed to offer living proof of the breed’s good and loyal nature, for she clearly adored Frank, who was seldom to be seen, walking about the village with his bowlegged gait, without her.

Max, resigned to giving at least the appearance of renewed interest, picked up a copy of
Wherefore Nether Monkslip
. As Max recalled, the Arthurian legend also featured prominently in Frank’s recounting, with Arthur recast as a lost pilgrim resting his horses at the Horseshoe on his way to Glastonbury. Max had a suspicion that this gratuitous reference had been worked into the narrative because the owner of the pub had agreed to keep copies of Frank’s opus on sale at the bar in case of passing tourists with ties to the world of London publishing.

Max idly flipped the book over. On the back dust jacket, beneath a photo of Frank at least twenty years out of date, one Jack Ralston-Fifle, Historian and Author, was quoted as finding the book “fascinating.” That, Max felt, certainly raised the question of what other books Ralston-Fifle had read, overriding the key question of who in hell Ralston-Fifle was in the first place.

“You’ve read it already, haven’t you?” Frank asked him now.

“Oh, yes, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was just really … good. Quite good.” God forgive me for being the liar I am, Max thought.

His words had a noticeably galvanizing effect.

“Yes, I felt there were parts, at least, that were extremely good in capturing the spirit of the various ages,” Frank said, eyes alight. “Pushing the historic envelope, as it were. You thought it successful?”