Hammer to Fall

by John Lawton

  “I don’t suppose you kept a bottle of best Lapland rotgut, did you? I think it’s just come into its own.”

  When she fell into a woozy sleep, Wilderness put a blanket over her and emptied the cutlery drawer into a briefcase. He’d counted neither markka nor dollars but it hefted up as a small fortune.

  He put a thousand dollars into one of the shoes she’d kicked off before hitting the bottle, and then he went to bed.

  When he awoke Janis Bell had gone.

  §80

  It was a snowy Heathrow. The kind of landing weather to make the faint of heart grip the armrests white-knuckled. He could see nothing out of the window as the engines turned snow into dense white mist. As the plane slid along the tarmac it felt like being inside a glass snow globe, just waiting to be dropped from dead fingers.

  A Special Branch copper intercepted him ahead of the queue for Passport Control.

  “Mr. Holderness?”

  It was Ernie Leadbetter. Wilderness didn’t think they’d exchanged more than a dozen words, but he’d known him by sight for ten years or more. Leadbetter had always struck Wilderness as a copper who might have a bit of imagination—the kind of copper who knew enough not to dress like a copper—a deep blue Aquascutum overcoat wrapped around his boxer’s frame, a black cashmere scarf and, rather than a grubby, greasy trilby, no hat at all. What was it about the Branch and hats? A hat passing as an identity?

  “’Scuse the formality, sir, but identity—a quick look at your passport?”

  Wilderness had it open at the photo page. Leadbetter nodded, waved at the bloke up front and steered Wilderness past the line and out into the Arrivals hall.

  “I’ve a car waiting, sir. It’s rush hour but they’ll all be heading out of London, not in. We should be there in forty minutes or so.”

  He held open the back door of a Foreign Office Rover 95.

  Wilderness wondered, and then he asked.

  “Ernie, I’m not under arrest, am I?”

  “Lord no—the Colonel just wants you there in time for dinner.”

  “So we’re going …?”

  “To Campden Hill Square, sir.”

  Leadbetter closed the door, walked round to the other side, sat next to Wilderness and set the car in motion just by uttering the driver’s name.

  “Ernie,” Wilderness said as the car took the ramp down to the London Road. “What rank are you now?”

  “Chief Inspector, sir. Have been for two years now.”

  “Then drop the ‘sir.’ I’m just a sergeant and I haven’t been promoted since 1948.”

  They said nothing for a while. Leadbetter was not the kind of man to want to bring Wilderness up to date on how his favourite soccer team had done over the past six months.

  As they hit the Chiswick flyover, Wilderness said, “Ernie, what’s the buzz back at the office?”

  “You mean about yourself?”

  “Of course.”

  “Let me put it this way … some of us are hoping for a bottle of duty-free vodka.”

  Well—if that was all they knew …

  §81

  Burne-Jones opened the front door in person. Less for him than for the wife who bustled out, swathed in fur and headscarf, before Wilderness had even rung the bell.

  “Joe! Joe … Joe.”

  Each softer than the one before. Then the double kiss.

  “Alec’s such a rotter, nabbing you before you’ve even seen Judy. Must dash. Theatre, y’know.”

  Wilderness stood, gathering a fine layer of snow about his shoulders. Burne-Jones glared after his wife.

  “Bloody woman. What she forgot to tell you was that I’m not monopolising you at all. She and Judy are taking your children to a panto.”

  “Aren’t they a bit young for that?”

  “It’s more for Madge than for them. She feels about panto much as she does about farce, and Lonnie Donegan as Wishee-Washee proved irresistible. If he sings My Old Man’s a Dustman she’ll be in seventh heaven. Now, don’t just stand there. Come inside. It’s going to be a bollock-freezer tonight.”

  Wilderness hung up his coat. Sniffed the air.

  “Madge left us dinner?”

  Wilderness had eaten hundreds of Madge’s rather perfunctory potluck dinners.

  “Of course. Quid pro quo. There’s a nice little bourguignon on the hob. She’s become quite the cook. Ever since she discovered Len Deighton’s Cookstrip she’s been unstoppable. Calls it cuisine à la spook … her shorthand for it is spy-fry.”

  §82

  “… And then Burton told me I was fired. I took a couple of days getting back to Helsinki. For once it was convenient to show films.”

  “You ignored her?”

  “I dragged my feet. Needed thinking time. And I find I can think very well if I’m sitting through a stock-in-trade British comedy I’ve already seen twenty times. Alec Guinness has such a soothing voice. When I got back to Helsinki, Burton wasn’t there. She’d left a letter ordering me back to London. Following orders has never been my forte, but I wasn’t going to argue with that. And I find myself wondering what I could have done to get myself sent back three months ago. I merely sent an encode to Eddie asking if you were in the picture. He said you were. I assume Burton was here, raising hell.”

  “More or less. Certainly wasn’t out to make friends and influence people.”

  “So I cleared my flat … cleared my desk … although there was nothing on it … and …”

  “And here you are.”

  “And here I am. Back in Blighty. Has the risk diminished?”

  “You mean Thwaite? No, absolutely not. But they’re on their Christmas recess already, so we don’t need to worry about old Reg until the New Year. No … we need to worry about what you unearthed. You will recall I said not to go poking around?”

  “Hardly matters now, does it?”

  “It does and it doesn’t. You haven’t actually exposed the fact that the Finns are selling cobalt, that’s a given, didn’t need exposing—it’s the business they’re in. But you have rightly deduced the nefarious end product of one particular export of cobalt.”

  “The dirty bomb.”

  “Quite. Excellent work on your part, although I detect Eddie’s hand in this too, but it raises a problem. You see, we already knew Finland was selling bomb-grade cobalt.”

  “Then what the fuck was I doing in Lapland and why wasn’t that fact in my brief?”

  “Slow down, Joe. Don’t get mad. We already knew because the Finns aren’t selling cobalt to the Russians. You utterly misjudged your old chum Kostya. It seems as though he really was just buying vodka off you.”

  “I don’t get this. I don’t get any of it. The Finns are selling bomb-grade cobalt. You don’t deny that. If they’re not selling it to the Russians then to whom are they selling it?”

  “To us.”

  Wilderness heard his knife and fork hit the china. Had they fallen from his hands or had he slammed them down?

  “We’re making a dirty bomb?”

  “’Fraid so. Out in Oz. Place called Maralinga in South Australia.”

  “And we need Finnish cobalt to do this? We’ve been ripping the heart out of Africa for a hundred years—it’s what the fucking empire was for—surely we have all the copper, nickel and—fukkit—cobalt … we need.”

  “So one would think. But I’m told it’s a question of purity. Too many impurities and the chain reaction fizzles out like a wet banger on Guy Fawkes Night. Not so much the quality of the ore as the quality of the refining. In that area the Finns lead the world. Quite possibly the only one in which they do.

  “We’ve tried before, on a much smaller scale. But some bright spark thought we might give it one more go. Something to put us at the top table in the nuclear club. It’s proved a divisive issue, to say the least. And the reason you weren’t told about the Finnish connection was that you didn’t have clearance. I didn’t have clearance. When I read your encodes to Eddie I had to go upstairs and ask wha
t it was all about. That’s when … well I think words failed C. He asked where you were, but you were out of touch in Lapland by then. In the meantime Burton’s man at the embassy had cracked the code you and Ed invented and she hit the roof. And it was blown. Too many people knew. Burton hasn’t done herself any favours, insisting on her right to know as Head of Station. Ridiculous. Even the ambassador didn’t know. I’m afraid Mrs. Burton’s days in the service are numbered.”

  “Then promote the woman in her outer office. Janis Bell is twice as smart as Jenny Burton.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind. And while we’re discussing personnel. There remains the problem of you.”

  “I thought that might be the case.”

  “There are people who’d like to shoot you and people who want to give you a medal.”

  “So nothing’s changed, then?”

  “Bear with me, Joe. For a while—more a moment, actually—we thought we might have to take young Kostya out. All depended on how much you’d alerted him to what was really going on.”

  Wilderness would have hated that—for all his flaws, naïvetés really—Kostya was a likeable man—almost a friend, if field agents had friends. When he’d pulled him from the water, Kostya had sobbed like a boy. And when they’d followed the tyre tracks and found the Australians’ cabin it had taken hours and hours to get him warm again. Bruce asking him, “What kind of a bastard are you, Joe?” Momo boiling kettle after kettle of water. And Kostya staring at him over the top of his mug of cocoa, with those big blue eyes, more in utter incomprehension at the betrayal of trust than in hatred.

  “But you haven’t taken him out and you won’t.”

  [Pause.]

  “No. No, we won’t. Don’t let this go to your head, Joe—but you did us all a favour. It was a dodgy, disgusting project. Absolutely divided the general staff and the top brass at the MoD. The idea that it might have been compromised was the last straw. The project’s been axed. Much to the delight of the Australians who never wanted it there in the first place. One wishes they had said so sooner. I can’t pretend you’ve returned home a hero … but …”

  “But the world’s a safer place because of me.”

  “Oh dear, I see it’s gone to your head already.”

  §83

  Judy collected him from Campden Hill. The winter hardtop on her two-seater MG glistening with snow under the lamplight.

  She stood on the doorstep and hugged him. Blew her father a kiss from the palm of her hand.

  “Chop chop, Joe. Can’t hang about. Ma’s on girl-duty. I said I’d relieve her before eleven.”

  She chattered amiably, affectionately. He did not listen.

  By Regent’s Park, Wilderness asked her to pull over and threw up at the side of the road.

  “Anything the matter? Or is it just booze?”

  He was staring into his own vomit. Staring at the clay-coloured slush he was standing in.

  “Joe?”

  “No. Not booze. Something else. I don’t know what.”

  But he did.

  “Will you make it home?”

  “Yes. Just give me a minute.”

  Now he stared at the sky, slightly surprised not to see the sky over Joeerämaa or Persereiikkä, the London city sky perceived through a distorting haze of sodium lamps, but then everything had been a distortion—everything. He’d been living in a hall of mirrors.

  §84

  He lay on his back, staring at the silver stars Judy had painstakingly stuck to the Tuscan-blue bedroom ceiling—a ceiling that Wilderness could not help but think of as cobalt blue. Even the toothpaste was cobalt blue. He’d showered in seconds, but he’d scrubbed his teeth vigorously for minutes to lose the taste of vomit.

  “Tell me,” she said simply.

  He said nothing.

  She wriggled sideways and gently headbutted his shoulder like a demanding cat.

  “Tell me.”

  “Alec’s being very nice about it. I might just have received the gentlest bollocking of my life. But it remains. I fucked up. I didn’t have enough facts so I invented something that made sense of the facts I did have.”

  “Y’know, when I was at Cambridge the lit critters had a word for that.”

  “What?”

  “Fab … hang on … fab something … fabulation.”

  “Lies is simpler. Only one syllable.”

  “You lied to yourself, you mean?”

  “Thus boredom doth make liars of us all.”

  “OK. Now you really have lost me.”

  “Liars, thieves and spies.”

  “Ah … back on the rails. I’m with you now, but let’s drop it. Spilt milk, spilt vodka. Who really cares?”

  “I came close to killing a man.”

  “An innocent man?”

  “No … he was never that.”

  “And if I understand a lifetime with my father and the best part of fifteen years with you, the agent in the field, like it or lump it, is copper, judge, jury and occasional executioner. Lonely place, the field.”

  “Innocence doesn’t matter. You lose your innocence the minute you strap on the holster. I almost killed … almost … a friend.”

  “Was that ‘I almost killed a friend’ or ‘I almost killed someone who was almost a friend’? Almost in the latter instance meaning ‘not quite.’ ”

  Wilderness said nothing

  “OK. Let’s drop it. You’re home now. This isn’t the field, it’s a queen-sized bed and I am your wife-sized wife.”

  She was silent for a few minutes but he knew from her breathing that she had not fallen asleep.

  Then he felt her fingernails walking sharply up his spine and she began to sing softly.

  “My old man’s a spookman … he wears a spookman’s hat …”

  §85

  In the morning Judy left five minutes after the nanny arrived. Wilderness took the opportunity to hide the stash he had brought out of Finland. He still hadn’t counted it and didn’t now—it was whatever it was, less the thousand dollars he had given to Janis Bell.

  As a scarcely reformed thief he was well aware how difficult it is to hide anything from the probing, devious mind of a cat burglar. As hiding places went, mattress, chimney and cistern were little better than planting a flag reading “here’s the swag.” The discerning man needed to go a step further to keep his ill-gotten gains from the next ill-getter.

  Years ago, before he was married, he’d set a safe into the wall behind the lavatory cistern. Your average burglar would lift the lid on the cistern—he’d be unlikely to go in for the plumbing required to turn off the water and unmount the cistern to find the nine-inch metal door it concealed.

  His Finland stash joined the remnants from other rackets, some now quite distant. He really should take those white five-pound notes into a bank—they’d not been legal tender for five years now. They’d been the foundation of what he thought of as his running-away-from-home fund. It was just that he’d never found running away from home to be necessary.

  Bolting the porcelain cistern back into place he wondered why he’d never told Judy about it. He and Judy had much in common and many differences. The one that sprang to mind, monkey wrench in hand, was that she believed a husband and wife should have no secrets—and he didn’t.

  Vienna

  §

  Vienna, The Imperial Hotel: September 1955

  Standard procedure that felt nothing of the sort. By the book, but what the book didn’t say was what you did now.

  Standard procedure. One bullet to the heart, one to the head. Not six feet from his target.

  In the confines of a small, tiled hotel bathroom his Browning 7.65 sounded like artillery, a cannon to the ear.

  Surely someone must have heard, was Wilderness’s first thought.

  And his second was that the Russian’s eyes were still open.

  Half his brains splattered across the wall and still his eyes were open.

  VI

  Armagnac and Easter E
ggs

  §86

  They got through Christmas without incident. He always thought they would. Judy could structure Christmas in such a way as to avoid overexposure to her family—she had three sisters, Wilderness had no one … no one that he knew of, no siblings, no cousins, no parents … to the extent that Burne-Jones had dubbed him “the Perfect Spy,” the man without ties and constraints—until the day Wilderness had married his daughter … and late in the marriage had made him a grandfather for the fifth and sixth times.

  The twins were still of an age when Christmas presents were of less interest than the paper that wrapped them. Wilderness put this to the test and wrapped them each an empty box. Molly opened the box, peered in, held it upside down to see if anything fell out, then returned gleefully to the wrapping paper. Joan shook it once and, not hearing anything rattle, put the box aside without opening it and proceeded to iron out the creases in the paper without the advantage of an iron.

  “You’re a bastard,” said his wife.

  “So people keep telling me.”

  So the Australians had told him, too. What other word would fit? He could still see the look on Kostya’s face as life and warmth crept back into it. Kostya had not called him a bastard. And it occurred to Wilderness that there probably wasn’t a word in Kostya’s vocabulary to convey what he thought of Wilderness at that moment.

  He hadn’t told Judy what he’d done out on the ice. He’d also never told her about the one man he had killed, in a hotel room in Vienna ten years ago. If he did, then she might see the point in his unspoken rejection of her “let’s have no secrets”—he had no wish to prove that point by revealing secrets she didn’t know he had kept only to have her say “I wish you’d never told me that.” Most of the time she asked him questions he could answer. Most of the time she knew when it wasn’t worth asking the question. Most of the time he could sit on the loo without thinking of the box of secrets behind it. And he’d told her very little of his last Berlin venture. She’d figured that one out for herself.