Hullo Russia, Goodbye England

by Derek Robinson

  “Good for you,” Silk said. “Well, cello lesson’s over, I’ll be off.”

  Gladstone raised a hand. “The Church takes a relaxed view about pastoral duties nowadays. My parish is the Press, the world of journalism. I work where I pray. It makes you one of my flock.”

  “He says he’s doing a series on pilots’ hobbies,” Tess said.

  “Nothing more boring.” Silk said. “Nobody’s interested in that stuff.”

  “Skilfully presented,” Gladstone said, “it’s absolutely riveting.”

  “So you say. Well, time’s up. Cheerio.” Silk picked up his cello case and walked out. Gladstone followed him.

  “I’m disappointed, flight lieutenant. I see I have underestimated the degree to which you value your privacy.”

  They reached the lane and stopped. It was a mild, still evening. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Silk said.

  “Oh, I think you know what it means. If you don’t want publicity, I can equally guarantee secrecy. It will cost you a thousand pounds. For the church restoration fund, you understand.” Gladstone was still being enormously friendly.

  “This is turning into a peculiar day,” Silk said. Tess had followed them, and was leaning on the gate. “Don’t you think it’s peculiar?” he asked her. But Tess was looking down the lane. Silk turned and saw Stevens walking towards him. “Now it’s gone beyond peculiar,” he said. “Now it’s the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. This is Stevens, our under-butler,” he told Gladstone. “Have you got an under-butler? No, of course not. Lucky you, they’re stupendously bossy. Worse than wives. Look: I don’t know where you got the idea that I’m going to give you or anyone a thousand pounds. It’s quite ridiculous.”

  “Of course it is. Two thousand is my price for not informing your commanding officer that you and this delightful lady have been banging like a loose shutter in a high wind, to the prejudice of your security status and the defence of the realm. Surely that’s well worth two thousand. No, listen: tell you what, I’ll make it twenty-five hundred.”

  “You’re not a vicar,” Silk said.

  “That’s irrelevant now.”

  “May I relieve you of that burden, sir?” Stevens asked. He took the cello case and moved away.

  “Tell the CO what the hell you like,” Silk said. “Mrs Monk and I are studying the cello. That’s the truth.”

  “I have photographs,” Gladstone said. “Photographs in which you two are indeed playing duets, but none that the Royal College of Music would recognise. Now that’s the truth.”

  “Fakes. Anyone can fake a picture.”

  “These are moving pictures.” Gladstone chuckled. “In every sense. Both cinematic and emotive and active. You make a very athletic subject, flight lieutenant. Prime condition. Three thousand pounds.” He might have been a gentleman farmer, bargaining over cattle.

  “Tell you what: I’ll fight you for it.” Silk was unbuttoning his tunic. “Here and now. Bare-knuckle stuff. Anything goes – kicking, gouging, knee in the balls, elbow in the teeth, no limits. Last man standing wins.” He gave his tunic to Tess.

  Gladstone looked amused. “You’re a romantic, flight lieutenant. I don’t gamble on fisticuffs. I trade in certainties.”

  Silk rolled up his sleeves. “I lose, you get the Cabrilloni, it’s worth a fortune. You lose, I get the photographs. If they exist.”

  “Ludicrous idea. Your blood is of no value to me.”

  “I want yours.” Silk raised his fists and moved forward. “I’m sick of bullshit, I want a good hard knockdown fight.”

  Gladstone’s hands were in his jacket pockets. “I am not so foolish as to come unarmed,” he said.

  “This is stupid,” Tess said. Just words: no emotion. “Two grown men fighting in the street. Childish.”

  “Not me, madam,” Gladstone said. “I am left with no option but to consult the station commander.”

  “I’ll kill you first.” Silk threw a couple of punches, just out of range.

  “I wish you’d both die,” she said. “Go off and play in the traffic, it’s all you’re good for.”

  Silk edged forward. “Let’s see the colour of your blood,” he snarled. A line as bad as that had to be snarled. He wondered what he would do if he hit Gladstone once, hard, and the man fell down. What then? Pick him up, the way Tucker picked up the bookie? Gladstone looked a hefty, meaty specimen. Silk’s arms were beginning to tire. Then: “Christ Almighty!” he cried, and stepped forward, too late.

  Stevens held the cello by its neck, swung it like a sledgehammer, and smashed the soundbox against Gladstone’s head so hard that the woodwork shattered and the splintered wreckage lay on Gladstone’s shoulders. He collapsed to his knees. Blood cascaded from his bald head. Stevens was left holding the neck of the cello, and he clubbed Gladstone twice. The second blow sent him sprawling. Stevens dropped the club, stooped and eased Gladstone’s false teeth from his gaping mouth. “We don’t want the poor fellow to come to any harm,” he said. He wrapped the dentures in a handkerchief, and tucked them into Gladstone’s jacket pocket. “His remark about moving pictures was in very poor taste, I thought.”

  Silk had never seen such an act of violence, even in the war, when bombing from twenty thousand feet made violence remote. His mouth was dry; he had to swallow before he could say: “Is he dead?”

  “Does it matter, sir?” Stevens asked.

  “He’s still breathing,” Tess said. “See the bubbles.”

  Without the dentures, Gladstone’s face looked thin and weak. Blood-tinged bubbles were leaking from his mouth. “You maniac,” Silk said. “That cello was priceless. It was a Cabrilloni. Irreplaceable.”

  “It was rubbish,” Tess said. “I got it from a junk shop for thirty shillings.”

  “You said...”

  “Yes, well, I say a lot of things. It amuses me.”

  Silk turned on Stevens. “You didn’t know that.”

  “I know there is no Cabrilloni in the Groves Dictionary of Music. If you will guard the scene, sir, I shall fetch the shooting brake.” He walked away.

  “I don’t know what the hell’s going on,” Silk told Tess.

  “Well, for a start, your under-butler is not who he seems to be,” she said. The bull terrier waddled past her and sniffed Gladstone’s head, and was not impressed. It waddled away and collapsed on its belly, all its legs splayed. “Those threats about telling your commanding officer. Does he take such a dim view of illicit sex?”

  “Yes. No. It’s not so much the sex as the blackmail.”

  Tess was rubbing the dog’s belly. “I’m glad I saw it. You could live your whole life, and never see anyone get brained like that. Like a perfect smash in tennis. And with a cello.”

  Silk used his foot to scrape together fragments of wood. “We should cover him up. What if somebody comes along?”

  “Never fear. I’ll set the dog on them.”

  Silk looked at the sleeping dog, and the bleeding body, and the lovely face of an unworried woman, and he gave up. Stevens backed The Grange’s shooting brake towards them at high speed. They loaded Gladstone, still unconscious, into the back. Silk kissed Tess. Why not? Everyone knew. He got into the brake. Stevens drove. “Where are we going?” Silk asked. “Better you don’t know,” Stevens said. “Do you think you would have punched him?”

  “Certainly.” Silk didn’t like the sound of that. Too brash. “Dunno.”

  “The cinema has a lot of answer for. Just when a scenario demands swift and brutal action, the hero and the villain waste time in cheap dialogue. I lost patience with your confrontation. Blame my low threshold of boredom.”

  After about five minutes, there was a long groan from the back. Silk turned to look. Gladstone’s face was striped red with blood, and some of the ruined cello still hung around his neck. He made a toothless statement, all pain and saliva. “That’s not English,” Silk said.

  “Polish,” Stevens said. “Freelance, on a retainer from KGB in the hope that he’ll find so
meone like you they can blackmail for secrets.”

  “But he wanted money.”

  “Yes. He got bored, got greedy, got reckless. End of his career. Forget him.”

  Silk watched the outskirts of Lincoln drift by. “You’re MI5, then,” he said.

  “I might be, but then so might Tess Monk. So might you. For all I know, you two were running a sting operation to get the Pole to break cover. Or perhaps I’m KGB and the Pole is MI5. Or neither. We’re all rogue males, fighting for our territory. Take your pick.”

  They drove into the grounds of a private hospital. Stevens went inside. The Pole groaned, and vomited onto his legs, and spat. “Watch your language, vicar,” Silk said. “You’re not in church now.” His own arrogance impressed him.

  Stevens came out with three men dressed in white. They put the Pole in an ambulance and drove away. Stevens got in the brake and opened the windows. “Men who are knocked out invariably throw up,” he said. “Something else the cinema gets wrong.”

  “Why the dogcollar?”

  “Why not? It worked. He certainly had you rattled. KGB doesn’t hire agents with fur hats and bad English.”

  “Gladstone. That was a nice touch.”

  “Real name Paretek-Sasak.” Stevens concentrated on getting past a couple of tractors towing loads of straw bales. “Too cocky, too greedy. If he’d asked nicely for a couple of hundred, you might have paid.”

  “No can do. Zoë’s got the money, not me. You know that.”

  “So ask her for it. Tell her you’re being blackmailed.”

  “Oh, sure. Tell her Tess and I ...”

  “She knows that. Knew from the start.”

  Silk stared out of the window as a field went by. They were burning the stubble: raw red flame under thick black smoke. “Bang goes my marriage, then.”

  “Not necessarily.” Stevens was back to his old smoothness. “By no means necessarily.”

  He dropped Silk at the Citroën. Tess was still standing by the gate. She was watching the bull terrier gnaw on a large bone. “He’s too tired to go inside,” she said. “Easier to feed him here.”

  “He’s lazy. You spoil him.”

  “In dog-years he’s the equivalent of eighty. Maybe you’ll be glad of someone to bring you a bone when you’re his age.”

  Silk looked at the farmhouse. “Shall we go inside?”

  “No. Go away, Silko. I’ve had enough of men for a while. You’re just small boys. Everything you can pick up, you want to break.”

  He thought about that. “Not entirely untrue, I suppose.”

  “You owe me for your last lesson.” He gave her five pounds and she said: “A quid for the cello.”

  “A quid. For a Cabrilloni. Fair enough.” He paid her, and they shook hands. He half-turned away but he was reluctant to go. “Isn’t there anything, you know, happy to be said?”

  “Nothing.” She was wide-eyed and cheerful. “Nothing is best. Otherwise you’re bound to misunderstand it.”

  He drove to Kindrick, trying hard to make sense of events. All he knew for certain was he wouldn’t have to heave that bloody cello about any more. That was one big improvement.

  THE MOB FOUGHT THE WRECK

  1

  When Freddy told Silk he was the tenth assistant deputy director on the right as you went into Air Ministry, he was being modest, for tactical reasons. In fact he was deputy head of the department that administered Bomber Command. When his boss retired, everyone expected Freddie would move up.

  His boss came back from lunch. Freddy was waiting.

  “There’s a direct line between C-in-C Bomber Command and C-in-C Strategic Air Command in Omaha,” Freddy said.

  “I helped negotiate it,” his boss said. “As you know.”

  “It’s not working. Nobody answers the phone.”

  This had never happened before. The British and American commanders were on first-name terms; normally they talked every day, often twice a day. When one of them crossed the Atlantic he was welcomed in the other’s headquarters, and into the most secret operations rooms. Now, suddenly, SAC had shut the door.

  “It can’t be Berlin,” Freddy said. “We’re built into the integrated attack plan. If Kruschev got shirty about Berlin, Omaha would be on the phone day and night. Where else? The oil states? China?”

  “It’s something in their own backyard,” his boss said.

  “The Caribbean? Makes no sense. Kennedy won’t invade Cuba, not after the Bay of Pigs nonsense.”

  “Wasn’t exactly Camelot, was it?”

  “Perhaps they aim to repeat Operation Ortsac,” Freddy said. “But that wasn’t secret, and it didn’t shift Castro, did it? I’m slightly baffled.”

  His boss informed the PM’s office. Freddy called his contacts in the Foreign Office and elsewhere. No joy. Something was up. Nobody knew what.

  2

  Since childhood, Skull had collected a ragbag of nightmares. Sometimes they left him alone for months or years. Then they lurched back into his sleep, as ugly as drunks. They might reappear so often that his sleeping mind recognised a prancing monstrosity and wearily told it to get out of his dream. It always stayed, until its tormenting jolted him awake and left him clenching the tangled bedclothes, searching for comfort and sanity in the thick grey light of pre-dawn.

  He thought he knew what his nightmares were about: it was a fear of losing control, and a terror of confined spaces. When he was small, his sisters had shut him in a wardrobe and gone away. Or maybe he had feared such cruelty and invented the wardrobe. The horror was just as real. Since then he always slept with the windows open and the door ajar. Losing control was different. At school, gymnastics had been compulsory. Skull dreaded handstands and cartwheels and somersaults, any action that threw his sense of balance into chaos.

  Flying offered both terrors. It locked Skull in a box and without warning it changed direction, often violently. There was also the risk of exploding, burning and crashing. Flying robbed him of all control. He hated it. Throughout his twenty years as an Intelligence Officer he had flown only twice. In 1939 he went to France in a slow, steady Bombay troopcarrier and was painfully sick. In the middle of the war he was a passenger in a Wellington bomber in a raid on Germany. The flak and the evasive tactics were so intense that he was in a state of utter exhaustion even before they turned for home. He was ill for a week and scarred forever.

  “Good news,” Silk said. His mouth was serious but his eyes were enjoying it. “The simulator’s had a cancellation this afternoon.”

  “Splendid,” Skull said. It was only an imitation, it wasn’t flying, it was a couple of hours sitting inside an enormous toy. Silk was a turd, a typical pilot. Just because he could defeat gravity at the taxpayer’s expense he thought he was God. “Refresh my memory,” Skull said. “Exactly what are we going to do?”

  “Exactly what? Christ knows. That’s the difference between intelligence and operations, Skull. You expect war to behave reasonably, whereas I know it’s always a cock-up.” Silk waited, but Skull had no comment. “Fourteen hundred hours,” Silk said. “Don’t be late. Kruschev’s missiles are very prompt.”

  3

  The word simulator was deceptive. It didn’t so much simulate as duplicate. Getting into the thing was exactly like climbing into a Vulcan’s cockpit: the same size, the same controls, the same feel, the same array of buttons and switches and gauges on all sides. Same smell. Same sounds. Same cramped view.

  Silk was in his seat, finishing his pre-flight checks, when Skull arrived, dressed as a wing commander. Silk was in lightweight flying kit. “You’ll sweat like a pig in that outfit,” he said. “The Vulcan’s tropical. Too late now.”

  “I wasn’t told.”

  “You didn’t think to ask.” He watched Skull take off his tunic and look for somewhere to hang it. “This isn’t the Dorchester,” Silk said. “Chuck it behind you.”

  He got on with his job, talking to the rear crew and to the tower. Skull knew enough to plug in hi
s intercom but he understood little: the talk was too fast, too cropped. Then the engines started and it was like sitting in the middle of a ceaseless thunderstorm. The cockpit vibrated: not much, but Skull sensed disaster and his hands squeezed the armrests. The vibration began to hurt his teeth. He discovered that he was clenching his jaws, and he forced himself to relax.

  The bomber rolled. It was raining and the wipers were flinging water off the windscreen with a fury that he found manic. He closed his eyes. “Kick the tyres and light the fires,” Silk said. Skull opened his eyes. “Good luck charm,” Silk told him. He moved the throttles and the thunderstorm was lost in a volcanic blast. Skull thrust himself back against his seat and the nightmare swarmed about him. Everything was out of control. It got worse: the Vulcan tipped backwards until he was watching the cloudbase hurtle towards them. They smashed through it and gradually he came unstuck from his seat. The engines had faded to a soft bellow. His ears popped. The sun came out. Silk gave him a boiled sweet. “How high are we?” Skull asked.

  “By the time I tell you we’ll be higher still.”

  Life became less intolerable. The Vulcan levelled out and the engines settled down to a steady roar, no worse than collapsing surf. “Cruise climb,” Silk said. Skull knew what that was: burning fuel to lose weight to climb more easily. “What’s our target?” he asked. Silk gave him a map.

  A long and very jagged red line ended at the city of Sverdlovsk. Skull loathed it. Bolsheviks shot the Tsar’s family there in 1918. Soviet missile knocked down Gary Powers’ U2 spy plane there in 1960. Skull didn’t gave a toss about the Tsar or Powers: they got what they asked for. What appalled him was that Sverdlovsk was forty miles east of the Ural Mountains. It was in Siberia. It was more than halfway to China. This raid stretched in front of him like a jail sentence. “Where the devil do we land?” he asked.