World War Two Will Not Take Place (10 page)

‘I'd enjoy that, Clifford,' Mount said.

‘I feel there is a natural rapport between us, demonstrated in the fact that we both noted as very significant the “locally crafted slabs”.'

Even if he had known which hotel Clifford was at, Mount thought he'd have to skip this next meeting with him, despite the deep rapport about slabs. The spy business was like that: you met all kinds of fascinating and dull people, and you treated them the same. They
were
the same: they were equally there to be fooled and possibly milked, and once this necessity passed, they were equally there to be ditched. Instead of rendezvousing with Clifford that evening he would go back to Toulmin's apartment block. As long as he saw no obvious watchdogs, he'd enter thirty-seven. Earlier, he hadn't tried to identify possible surveillance. It would have been useless: too many students of
plattenbauten
, or supposed students of
plattenbauten
, occupied the stairs and landings, the corridors, and apartment thirty-four.

Mount still had no pistol, only his bunch of twirls and a narrow-beam torch, intended to provide concentrated, controllable light and limit the spread of give-away glints. He decided he wouldn't get down on hands and knees to sniff at the bottom of the door for cigarette smoke, or worse. That was potentially farcical and would be hard to explain if someone came into the corridor and stood over him, perhaps sympathetically assuming a fit or heart attack. Non-conclusive, too. The crew waiting might be non-smokers, or had been ordered not to smoke, for fear their prey did the under-door test. Most of these trade tricks were internationally known among secrets people. It might be possible to have a sniff for cigarette odour through the keyhole. Mount believed, anyway, that the couple opposite in thirty-four would have noticed, and mentioned, if strangers had installed themselves at thirty-seven.

It was just before nine p.m. when he returned, and October-dark. He rambled for a while again in the street, staying close to the apartment block now and observing carefully. He saw nothing to trouble him. There were still folk about, yes, going in and out at the apartment building, but ordinary folk carrying on their ordinary lives, as far as he could judge, not waiting for a visitor to Toulmin. Of course, he couldn't be sure. They might be folk skilled at looking like ordinary folk carrying on their ordinary lives, but really folk waiting for a visitor to Toulmin, to the traitor Toulmin. If they were on that kind of pounce duty, though, they'd most likely reappear regularly. It didn't happen while Mount looked, and he looked for half an hour: no encore performances. He'd push on. There was a small entrance foyer to the apartment block. As he stepped towards it, he saw a man descend from the stairs, obviously on his way to the street. Mount knew he must keep going, not veer off abruptly, scared. It could be a giveaway. He must pretend some of that ordinariness.

‘Ah,' the man said, ‘you are still here?'

For a moment Mount had not recognized the host from thirty-four. The delay was excusable. He appeared much scruffier now. He wore a grubby navy jacket and black canvas cap, a rough navy jersey, greasy looking dark trousers, and was pulling on an aged, long raincoat before going out into the autumn. He had on heavy black boots. Mount guessed these must be work clothes. He was going to the factory he'd spoken about earlier. He'd arranged his shifts, hadn't he, so he could be there when they called this morning?

‘Our session with you was very helpful, very instructive, but I wanted half an hour to look at the development on my own,' Mount said.

‘Without your English friend who is so concerned about the
plattenbauten
?'

‘It's a matter of getting the full picture,' Mount replied.

‘You couldn't do that this morning?'

‘Ah, but that
was
this morning. I've seen the building by day, and as a matter of fact done a plan of it, but I wanted also the evening perspective. The occupants' activities will be different at this time of day.' A low-powered bulb lit the foyer. Mount pulled the papers out of his pocket again, this time with Baillie's front-elevation sketch visible. ‘I have to be able to tell my colleagues at home in Britain exactly what I've observed here. I, and I alone, represent their interests.'

The man looked. ‘It's a good drawing.'

‘One aspect only.'

‘But correct, I think. Here is the apartment we discussed.' He put a finger on thirty-seven's windows.

‘Which?' Mount said.

‘Number thirty-seven,' he said. He moved his finger. ‘Here the bedrooms, the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom.'

‘Thirty-seven? Ah, yes, of course, the man you never see.'

‘Almost never.'

‘Now and then?'

‘Yes, now and then.'

‘Special occasions!'

‘Yes, perhaps so. He had a new chair delivered not long ago, so, obviously, he must open the door and talk to the men. My wife saw this when coming back to the apartment one day. She thought it seemed an expensive chair – metal and wood, laminated.'

‘I expect he wants to be comfortable when he sits in there alone.'

‘I must go now. I'll lose a quarter of an hour's pay if I'm late,' he said, buttoning his raincoat.

‘Night work?'

‘Oh, yes.'

‘The factory operates non-stop – twenty-four hours?'

‘Oh, yes.'

‘There are plenty of jobs, are there?'

‘Oh, yes, recently.'

Making mortar shells? U-boat fins? Dornier P59 bomber parts? Mount wanted to ask, but didn't. Questions could become too insistent, too professional – or non-professional for a dwellings specialist. ‘When I refer to the evening perspective, I want to find what sound levels are like in the building now most people are at home, relaxed and playing their radios and gramophones and so on. This is quite important. Some people in Britain don't like neighbours' din. It's an attitude they've taken from the upper classes, who live in manor houses away from the populace. I'll stroll the corridors.'

‘You fear that if the
plattenbauten
have shifted, as your friend suggested, noise might be able to crawl through the gaps and attack?'

‘He
was
a worrier, wasn't he?'

‘I won't slam the door when I leave now in case the apartment block falls on you because the
plattenbauten
are unstable. Then you wouldn't be able to go back to your country and say how wonderful the
Splanemann-Siedlung
apartments are, owing to your death.'

Mount climbed to the third floor. The corridor was empty. He walked pretty silently, he thought, to thirty-seven. His fourth key turned the lock. The corridor had remained clear. He went in and closed the door quietly behind him. That took a struggle. The training said you always left yourself a ready exit, especially when going on to unknown ground which might contain an enemy – or enemies. And, God, surely it must be a plural, if he was expected. But he could not let the door stand ajar. That would bring attention, because this door's usual and notorious state was shut. He waited.

The training had taught him how to disarm someone when not armed himself, but not how to disarm several when not armed himself. He crouched a bit against the door. This seemed the best countermeasure he could manage if guns surrounded him in here. The training hadn't taught him, either, what a corpse would smell like after a longish time, but he thought it would be fairly bad, and he detected nothing like that now. SB, ex-no-man's-land, might have been able to tell him. There was a cigarette odour, but ingrained, not new. He stood still, bent against the door for a minute, sniffing the darkness, but also trying to sense whether in fact this place seemed to match thirty-four for layout. He heard what might be footsteps and the scrape of moved furniture. But he thought these sounds came from other apartments, not this one, perhaps because
plattenbauten
had shifted, leaving holes, or simply because this was an apartment block with the usual neighbourly noises when people lived on top of and alongside one another, jam-packed. If he had really been on an accommodation mission from Britain he would have made a note. He switched on his torch. He was in a small hallway, which gave on to a passage with doors leading off. That did square with thirty-four. All the doors were closed, so he could safely show light here. It did not reach a window. He thought the living room would be straight ahead. He'd try that first. He extinguished the torch and opened the door.

The curtains were not pulled across the windows. He knew that already, from viewing outside. A middling sized moon escaped the clouds once in a while and gave some light. And a bit of a glimmer came from street lamps a good way below. The room looked untidy, as if someone left in a big hurry, or as if a slam-bang search had happened, with no effort made to restore things. Three drawers in a sideboard had been pulled open and left like that. A crumpled shirt hung over the back of an armchair. Pages from several newspapers lay on the floor near one down-at-heel brown shoe and an empty beer bottle.

Mount did a full eye-inventory. Two armchairs: brown leatherette, not laminated wood and metal. Of course not: Toulmin and the girls had brought that one to Mount's apartment. He saw a burly radiogram in what might be mahogany; a couple of straight backed wooden chairs, perhaps also mahogany; beige-brown fitted carpet, newish; three framed watercolours of rural and river scenes, which seemed to hang all right, no jutting over wall bulges; the sideboard of some light wood that Mount couldn't place, out of tone with the mahogany. Some books and papers lay on it: he'd scan the books and papers shortly and look in all the sideboard drawers. Before that, he must get through the other rooms and see whether they contained anything or anybody, or any body, he
needed
to see. By now he felt certain thirty-seven was no ambush. He hadn't been grabbed, clubbed or shot when at his most targetable – coming through the front door.

The big bedroom and kitchen seemed as disorderly as the living quarters, maybe worse. The bed had not been made, and clothes were strewn about. On a kitchen unit he saw what appeared to be the leavings of an interrupted breakfast – half a grapefruit, some fragments of bread, a quarter-full coffee mug. A fork lay close to the mug in a small pool of gravy, perhaps from the previous night's meal. But the single bedroom, when he opened that door, was neat and spruce, a kind of ladylike touch, as good as anywhere in thirty-four, and
they'd
been forewarned to get tidy. If the apartment had been searched, wouldn't they have done this room as well? The idea strengthened in him that Toulmin had gone somewhere urgently and fast, not having time to spruce up the rooms he actually used, promising himself it could be put to rights when he returned. But the other explanation for the showpiece small guest bedroom might be that searchers had found whatever they were after elsewhere in the apartment and didn't need to turn that one over. The open drawers in the sideboard looked like evidence of a failed search, but might not be: possibly they'd taken something they'd been hunting from one of them. What, though?

He went back into the living room. To examine the papers and books he would have to use his torch. Had a good education made him regard books and papers as incomparably important: all that devoted labouring over Greek and Latin texts had slanted his mind? At any rate, he did regard them as important. But no matter how thin the torch's ray, it might be noticeable from outside: a sudden stab of white after long-time blackness. He switched on, though. He kept the torch close and stood with his body stopping most of the light from reaching a window. He put the beam momentarily on the papers. They seemed to be mostly family letters, including a wedding invitation. But he saw, also, the receipt for a birch wood and metal laminated armchair. That troubled him, though he couldn't fathom why. It told no real tale. He put the receipt in his pocket. Never mind the reason.

He wanted a better look at the papers and wondered whether he could draw the curtains briefly. He might then even risk switching on the living room's overhead bulb. A reasonable gamble? He came to think so. The curtains were heavy and almost reached the floor. They would let little or no light through. He put the torch out, moved to the side of the window and paused. Closing the curtains would involve standing behind each in turn, concealed from outside, and tugging it to the centre. He must act quickly, because a half curtained window would be conspicuous. Right. And he was just about to start when he instinctively glanced down around the edge of this curtain to check whether anyone outside watched.

On the pavement in the street leading to the apartment block, he saw three men walking at a good lick, perhaps making for this building. It was shadowy despite the overhead lamps, but he thought one of the three might be Toulmin. Although he couldn't make out faces at that distance, the physical shape of this man and a rather jerky way of walking suggested Toulmin. Yes, ‘suggested' would be the right, imprecise word. The man walked between the other two. He and one of the pair carried a suitcase. Mount couldn't prolong this view of them. He had to get out of sight fast. He did nothing with the curtain and, stepping backwards, retreated from the window into the darkness of the room. He stood still briefly, trying to work out the meaning of what he'd seen. At least Toulmin – if it
was
Toulmin – could obviously walk all right, in that special, recognizable, undamaged style.

He had on a fur-covered, Russian-style winter hat, which obscured some of his face. But Mount came to feel half sure it
was
Toulmin – and felt fully sure he must get out of thirty-seven in case those three arrived. He reckoned he had about four minutes: two for them to reach the apartment block, and two on the stairs and along the corridor. He hadn't noticed any of them look up at the window. Assume, then, it must be Toulmin. The two men had both stayed half a yard behind him. How to read this? Were they escorts, jailers, or flunkeys? That could be important. Well, of course it could be important, bloody important. If he was a prisoner, a captive with captors, being brought back here for some reason, could Mount leave him to it? That abominable prospect of scampering retreat – of ‘save-yourself-do-dear-Marcus' – troubled him again. Poltroonery? Panic? Appalling selfishness? Professionalism?